Invisible Education (Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research) [1 ed.] 9781032021034, 9781032021096, 9781003181897, 1032021039

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Invisible Education
What Is Invisible Education?
Thinking About the Everyday
Invisible Education and Lifelong Learning
Invisible Education and Adult Education
Theorising Invisible Education: Learning Affect and New Worlds
Critical Posthumanism
Knowledge Sources
Conclusion
References
2 Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities
Critiquing Social Mobility
Future Mutabilities
Posthuman Ethics of Rights: Learning Affect
Alternative Knowledges
Conclusion
References
3 Invisible Others: Land, Animals, Machines and Things
Introduction
Everyday Learning in Nature
Invisible Education With the Land
Invisible Education With More-Than-Human Animals
Invisible Education With Machines
Invisible Education With Things
The Immaterial Thing
Uncanny Things
Symbolic Things
Conclusion
References
4 Invisible Knowledges: Activism, Volunteering and Work
Introduction
Invisible Education Through Activism
The Afterlife of Occupy
A Posthuman Approach to Activism
Formalised Activist Classrooms: ‘Throwing Bricks’
Activism as a Way of Life/lifelong Learning as Everyday Practice: ‘Part of My History’
Academic Activism/intellectual Engagement: ‘Never Looked Back’
Activism as a Philosophical Practice: ‘Towards a Wiser World’
Disillusioned Retreat From Activism/painful Lessons: ‘Naïve Ignorance’
Living On
Pedagogies of Pain: Art and Activism in Zones of Conflict
Invisible Education Through Volunteering
Devalued Knowledges: Marginalised Young People and Work
Conclusion
References
5 Invisible Beings: Postverbal People and the Invisible Education of Care
Beyond the Word
Invisible Beings
Music as Invisible Education
Learning Affects
New Postverbal Learning Worlds
Postverbal Lessons in the Home: ‘This Is What We Do With Mike’
The Invisible Education of Caring
Challenging Humancentric Education
Conclusion: Fertile Beings
References
6 Invisible Communities: The Contributions of Invisible Education
Introduction
Why Invisible Education?
What Are the Knowledges Created Through Invisible Education?
How Does Invisible Education Contribute to Critical Posthumanism?
How Does Invisible Education Generate Hope?
What Does Invisible Education Offer Communities?
Lessons for Formal Education?
The Duration of Invisible Education
References
Index

Citation preview

INVISIBLE EDUCATION

This original and challenging book introduces the ground-breaking concept of ‘invisible education’, theorising it with critical posthuman concepts and demonstrating it through a wide range of empirical research. Invisible education is the learning that happens in everyday life: it is invisible because it is purposively ignored and devalued, and it is education because it is powerful and formative. Far from being marginal, this is where the future is being formed. The book challenges the feel-good fiction of social mobility through formal education, replacing it with the new concept of future mutabilities, shaped through invisible education. The book is the first to bring together lifelong learning and critical posthumanism and does so in ways that are mutually illuminating. The book draws on a wide range of funded empirical research on invisible education: exploring landscapes, animals and things (material, immaterial and uncanny), activism, volunteering and work, home lives and care, and global contexts of conflict. It charts how invisible education plays a crucial role in the lives of marginalised people, including young people, activists, postverbal people, carers, women escaping domestic abuse and many others. Combining posthuman ideas with memoir, poetry, art and fiction, it is creative, intellectually stimulating and readable. Jocey Quinn is Professor of Lifelong Learning at Plymouth Institute of Education, University of Plymouth, UK. Her research is transdisciplinary and focuses on marginalised adults and their learning. She has published widely and led many international and national research projects. She has been working with posthuman ideas for the past ten years and is a joint co-ordinator of the Adventures in Posthumanism International Network.

Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Editor in Chief: Karin Murris (Universities of Oulu, Finland, and Cape Town, South Africa) Editors: Vivienne Bozalek (University of the Western Cape and Rhodes University, South Africa) Asilia Franklin-Phipps (State University of New York at New Paltz, USA) Simone Fullagar (Griffith University, Australia) Candace R. Kuby (University of Missouri, USA) Karen Malone (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) Carol A. Taylor (University of Bath, United Kingdom) Weili Zhao (Hangzhou Normal University, China) This cutting-edge series is designed to assist established researchers, academics, postgraduate/graduate students and their supervisors across higher education faculties and departments to incorporate novel, postqualitative, new materialist, and critical posthumanist approaches in their research projects and their academic writing. In addition to these substantive foci, books within the series are inter-, multi- or transdisciplinary and are in dialogue with perspectives such as Black feminisms and Indigenous knowledges, decolonial, African, Eastern and young children’s philosophies. Although the series’ primary aim is accessibility, its scope makes it attractive to established academics already working with postqualitative approaches. This series is unique in providing short, user-friendly, affordable books that support postgraduate students and academics across disciplines and faculties in higher education. The series is supported by its own website with videos, images and other forms of 3D transmodal expression of ideas – provocations for research courses. More resources for the books in the series are available on the series website, www.post​qual​itat​iver​esea​rch.com. If you are interested in submitting a proposal for the series, please write to the Chief Editor, Professor Karin Murris: [email protected]; [email protected].

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routle​d ge.com/Post​qual ​itat ​ive-New-Mate​r ial ​istand-Criti​cal-Posth​u man​ist-Resea​rch/book-ser​ies/PNMR

INVISIBLE EDUCATION Posthuman Explorations of Everyday Learning

Jocey Quinn

Designed cover image - Jocey Quinn First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Jocey Quinn The right of Jocey Quinn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032021034 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032021096 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003181897 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

To the memory of my dear friend Pat, and to Dave, Bella and Rosa, with love.

CONTENTS

Foreword Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Invisible Education

viii xi xii 1

2 Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities

18

3 Invisible Others: Land, Animals, Machines and Things

28

4 Invisible Knowledges: Activism, Volunteering and Work

60

5 Invisible Beings: Postverbal People and the Invisible Education of Care

83

6 Invisible Communities: The Contributions of Invisible Education

103

Index

112

FOREWORD

This year I taught undergraduate students about epistemological violence. I referenced the concept in passing, but it stuck to them, and they recognized something that they already knew. Some integrated the word into their vocabulary and applied the concept to their fieldwork, their college curriculum, and memories of their own educational experiences. The concept redirected their attention to things that might have been too normal to notice before and allowed them to critically linger. They learned that they could no longer take for granted that school and schooling should be as it has always been. This is the creative use of theoretical concepts. Sometimes they teach us what we already know or what we had been unable to notice. Concepts might cause us to look anew at the people, objects, and places that have become stagnant or stuck to a point of becoming utterly unexamined. (Asilia Franklin-Phipps) Jocey Quinn’s Invisible Education contributes to critical discourse about education by introducing new concepts that meaningfully shift what can be known and imagined about education. Offering a reconceptualisation of education beyond the categories of ‘formal’ and ‘non-formal’, the book introduces the concept and practice of ‘invisible education’, drawing attention to how learning happens in the midst of everyday living, in fortuitous and unseen ways. This challenge comes at precisely the time when many of us who teach and research in education have become clear that sedimented onto-epistemological frameworks, assumptions and cultures around education are urgently due a meaningful reorientation. The past two years have laid bare the dominant impoverished discourse of education. Invisible Education counters the malaise with a new vocabulary and a fresh attention

Foreword  ix

to ways of knowing/teaching/learning/being that has always been present but backgrounded. Based on a range of empirical research projects with groups of people disregarded by mainstream education, including postverbal people, elders in care homes, women escaping domestic abuse, young people in low-waged jobs and activists, this book makes a compelling case for a profound re-evaluation of the learning that takes place at the edges, under the radar and ‘beyond the beyond’ of educational institutions. In doing so, the text presents and enacts a kind of education that is not bound by the limits of dominance, capitalism and social hierarchy by centring learners who are often relegated to the margins. The book includes a range of creative writing formats to draw out new insights regarding learning and the every day. Animated by a posthuman sensibility, this book develops a new, transdisciplinary account of invisible education which unsettles presumptions of what is valuable in education and where education ‘should’ happen—instead proposing that we learn as we live in the world. Such everyday, invisible learning—its textures, tastes, sounds—is helping to shape the future in intangible and ineffable ways. Readers consider the stakes of education and how a different orientation to imagining education might shift everything we know about teaching and learning in educational institutions. Asilia Franklin-Phipps, SUNY, New Paltz Carol A. Taylor, University of Bath

PREFACE

In writing this book I have the following key aims, driven by my experience in researching what I am calling ‘invisible education’. • To introduce, explore and theorise ‘invisible education’. • To challenge the narrow construction of what counts as education and educational research. • To suggest that the adult learning which takes place in everyday life and activities is key to a critical posthuman analysis of education. • To show that such learning can benefit from a critical posthuman analysis. • To discuss the role such learning plays in being in the world and creating new worlds. • To explore the consequences for social justice, drawing on a range of research studies. • To challenge the predominance of the construct of ‘social mobility’ and replace it with one of future mutabilities. Jocey Quinn

newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With grateful thanks to all my research participants, collaborators and colleagues.

1 INTRODUCTION Invisible Education

This chapter will introduce and explain the new concept of ‘invisible education’, the learning that takes place in everyday life. It will discuss how this new category is more generative than informal or non-formal learning, and how it springs from a posthuman perspective. In doing so it will argue that the boundaries of educational research need to be redrawn for intellectual reasons and to address inequalities. It will argue that this everyday learning is a missing part of the debate on education and posthumanism and key to understanding the process of being in the world. The chapter will introduce the range of research studies used in the book showing the significance of invisible education for those considered non-learners or past learning, including postverbal people, elders in care homes, women escaping domestic abuse, young people in low-waged jobs and activists. Kathleen Stewart’s concept of ‘learning affects’ and Barad’s intra-active ‘new worlds’ will be introduced and discussed as key theoretical tools for understanding what is happening in invisible education. It will also explain how the book uses memoir, poetry, fiction and art as relevant knowledge sources for exploring the ineffable, everyday world of invisible education. What is invisible education?

Invisible education is what the poet Marilyn Hacker (2006) calls a ‘gift of the quotidian’: a gift waiting to be unwrapped. It is the learning that is always happening in daily life, but which is largely unseen and disregarded. It happens outside the bounds of formal spheres: beyond schools, universities, colleges and even beyond community education centres. To use Harney and Moten’s (2013, p. 27) terms, it is ‘beyond the beyond’ of Education. It is generated as we go about everyday life

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-1

2 Introduction

in nature or the home, or engage in activities such as activism, volunteering or the arts. To call it invisible education, rather than simply ‘informal learning’, is a polemical act, underlining its force but also suggesting a category that is more hidden, diffuse and open-ended, and open to fresh insights. Sociologists have long been interested in everyday life, perceiving it as ‘dynamic, surprising and even enchanting; characterized by ambivalences, perils, puzzles, contradictions’ (Neal and Murji, 2015, p. 811), but this fascination seems less shared by sociologists of education. Research focusing on adult literacy has a rich tradition of exploring everyday learning in that sphere (see Hamilton, 2006; Jones, 2018), and Tett and Hamilton (2021) have suggested new possibilities for adult education via popular movements and culture. However, there is room to expand much further into multiple facets of everyday life and to make use of transdisciplinary posthuman approaches and sources. Similarly, the body of work on everyday creativity (see Saito, 2017; Wright, 2022) can feed into the broader concept of invisible education. This book theorises invisible education from a posthuman perspective and makes the argument that this is where we learn to be in the world. In exploring and celebrating how learning happens in multiple spheres beyond classrooms, without recognition, it problematises what is normally understood to be ‘Education’ and opens the field of enquiry. ‘Education’ is often reified and ossified; invisible education is disruptive and generative. In some senses invisible education is a parallel world reminiscent of the everyday encounters and discussions in bars and basements described as ‘study’ in Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). However, only some can claim membership of The Undercommons, by virtue of their experience of oppression: it is not a tourist attraction. Only indigenous people can claim ownership of the ‘deep intellectual traditions borne out in Indigenous Studies departments, community halls, fish camps, classrooms, band offices and Friendship Centres’ (Todd, 2016, p. 7). Invisible education, however, is everywhere and everyone is engaged in it, even the oppressor. This book will use empirical research to explore learning that is incidental, ineffable but also significant and formative. It does not focus on skills or attributes but on new knowledge generation and uncovers those considered to be nonlearners, bad learners or beyond learning and their engagement with invisible education. Far from being marginal, this is where the future is being formed and so demands intellectual engagement. Many of the participants in these research studies are given little attention and few resources: postverbal people living with dementia, stroke or learning difficulties, elders living in care homes, women escaping domestic abuse, young people let down by formal schooling and working in low-status jobs, lifelong activists. They may be those who have kept society going in their long lives but are now unseen, or young people who sustain our everyday living in shops, cafes or building sites but stand invisible in the background. They are those considered failed or flawed or better hidden away. Invisible education is invisible for a reason, in that it does not fit dominant

Introduction  3

narratives about which knowledges matter and who is entitled to them. Shifting the focus to this area unsettles existing power relations. In a posthuman, postcolonial world, formal education is often increasingly anachronistic, tied as it is to a belief in both the unified human subject who can be perfected by education and to a set of national beliefs and values that education should transmit. In its fixity it cannot help but perpetuate social inequality. The world of formal education inevitably reproduces the values and assumptions that have created an unequal society in the first place. The idea of a ‘hidden curriculum’ of values and norms seems outdated, as this process of enculturation is firmly imprinted for all to see. To achieve social change, what constitutes learning and where and how it happens must be rethought. Access to good schooling and elite Higher Education are positioned as routes to ‘social mobility’, but all this means is that a few may move up, whilst entrenched patterns of inequality at the bottom remain the same. Meanwhile multiple forms of invisible learning, in activism, nature, arts, volunteering, offer potential for new forms of power, knowledge and subjectivity which can challenge inequalities but may also promote disinformation and discord. These neglected and unrecognised forms of learning are helping to shape the future and are where formative lessons about key social issues such as sustainability, racism and feminism are being learned: with both positive and negative consequences. Thinking about the everyday

Everyday life happens in moments that become absorbed into moving on, like the moment in this poem by Ella Frears (2020), inspired by Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture: And just at that moment the streetlamp You’re walking under switches on, like enlightenment … You just feel that feeling and carry on home ( from ‘On Stringing the Form’) In thinking about ‘everyday aesthetics’, Saito (2017, p. 124) summons the ‘the ordinary experienced as ordinary: the quiet, unarticulated aesthetic satisfaction interwoven with the flow of daily life’. The idea of the ‘ordinary experienced as ordinary’ is also suggestive of invisible education: learning every day is an unmarked but important part of the flow of life. In Let Me Tell You What I Mean Joan Didion (2021) describes how she has long forgotten what she learnt in a seminar on Milton but has never forgotten the journeys to and from the University of Berkeley, and the tastes and sights that impressed themselves upon her on the way. Her lifelong learning journey has been to work out what these tastes and sights meant, and how to respond to the questions and problems they

4 Introduction

raised. Invisible education is not about situations where learning is a goal or a pathway, but rather emerges indirectly from other activities and simply in daily living. As such it is oppositional to the ‘learning outcomes’ that have come to dominate formal education. Uncertainty and liminality replace preordained results, suggesting what I would call an epistemology of the ineffable. As Joe Moran (2020, p. 64) says: not everything worth learning slots into skills gaps we have already decided we need to fill. Some things are too ineffable to turn into data, that doesn’t mean they don’t matter or don’t exist. An epistemology of the ineffable explores knowledge and ways of knowing that escape and evade measurement, whilst still being formative and significant. It attends to the value of moments: these moments of learning time spin and vibrate in ways that are difficult to name but easy to feel. ‘We say “now!, now!, now!” or we count “more!, more!, more!” as we feel it bud’ (William James quoted in Burdick, 2016, p. 7). Some of the conceptual tools needed to think in this ineffable sphere come from unexpected places, from poetry and memoir, for example. For this reason, the book will draw on many sources: data acts (Gale, 2014) emerging from a wide range of research studies but also memoir, film, fiction, poetry and my own diary entries—my everyday invisible education. In the Afterward to her novel Strangers I know/La Straniera (2019), which crosses and recrosses fiction, autobiography and essay, Durastanti says: The cracks you contain are not just family, history or geography: fiction hurts, imagination hurts. Strangers you never meet hurt, in celluloid and on paper. (pp. 257–8) Her book ends with a list of the ‘shards’ that make up the ‘complex and evergrowing crystal’ (p. 260) of herself: the books, films, songs, TV programmes and games that occur throughout the book. The suggestion is that there is never a completed self and that all these materials have a powerful and shaping impact. This is reminiscent of my own work on ‘the unself ’ and ‘imagined social capital’ (Quinn, 2010), which argues that our fluid subjectivity may gain the most benefits from imagined or symbolic networks, including with those we don’t know or who are not real. Such cracks and capitals inform this book. In Happening (2001), Annie Ernaux describes how the voice of a singer helped her to go on living at a time of despair: Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible

Introduction  5

chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story. (Ernaux quoted in Biggs, 2021, p. 9) Invisible education involves unexpected and random teachers and peers, an ‘invisible chain’, unaware of the affect swirling around them. Invisible education and lifelong learning

A focus on invisible education operates in a context of renewed public interest in lifelong learning but a swinging pendulum of policy approaches. In England, for example, most recent communications from the government suggest a narrowing of focus and resources onto adult education that is explicitly tied to formal progression which will bring learners close to the labour market; discounting evidence that it is a search for pleasure or wellbeing that leads adult learners back into education. As an umbrella term lifelong learning embraces multiple forms, with a suggestion that it is open at any age and stage of life. It has been often co-opted by a policy agenda tied to a drive for constant employability but is also used to suggest learning for leisure or the more communal traditions of radical and workers’ education. At the same time, there has been a global surge of popular interest in learning as a mode of self-protection: a form of ‘wellness’ that helps stave off depredations of age. Examples of this include Vanderbilt’s (2020) affirmative account of learning how to do a number of new things in middle age. There seem to be a range of reasons for this movement, one being the prevalence of dementia and a desire to stave it off for as long as possible by putting the brain into cognitive bootcamp, and another being the enforced isolation of the pandemic. As often reported, this has forced people to stave off boredom with new activities, but also encouraged many to reassess their priorities and put long-held desires into action (see Talbot, 2021). As Holdsworth’s (2020) work on ‘busyness’ suggests, doing many things is also part of a neoliberal project of self-optimisation and can take on the aura of an individualistic moral act. This atomised learning agenda seems very different from the communal traditions of adult education, community education, workers’ education, the type of education which campaigns such as the Campaign for Adult Education in the UK are trying to revive, or lifelong learning networks such as ESREA in Europe revitalise. The focus of this book is somewhat different from either of these pathways: the atomised or the communal. What interests me here is the learning that emerges from other forms of everyday doing, seeing it as a powerful factor in the world. Invisible education and adult education

Although this book is informed by scholarship on adult education it takes a different trajectory. Adult education is a humanist tradition formed around a

6 Introduction

vision of a human in struggle who needs to access education to reach their full potential. Humans may gather together in solidarity, but they are still understood as distinct from other forms of matter. A posthuman understanding of the world is one of relationality where the human is not seen in isolation but as part of what Bennett (2010, pp. 23–4) calls ‘agentic assemblages’: Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations … Assemblages are not governed by one central head … Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force … but there is also … an agency of the assemblage. Working from this different assumption, the book tries to develop a critical posthuman theoretical perspective on how invisible education emerges through such assemblages, drawing on multiple transdisciplinary sources. It is not an exhaustive overview but rather an exploration using research conducted in this realm. It is worth thinking through how invisible education might differ from existing categories as well as what is shared. Adult education projects at grassroots level might as well be invisible for all the recognition and funding that they get. They are essential for society to flourish, promoting better health and awareness of arts and culture and combatting loneliness and mental health problems (see Staufenberg, 2022). Yet they are given far less attention, have received rapidly diminishing resources and are often ignored and disrespected (see Hager and Halliday, 2006). However, they do get significant academic analysis; most importantly it is acknowledged that they do at least exist. Similarly, there are very many educational activities offered online, on YouTube, or as MOOCs for example, which break down the confines of formal institutions, but again this sphere of digital education has its own growing body of research (see, e.g. Oztok, 2019). In contrast, invisible education, learning that is more ineffable and every day is a realm that is less explored or conceptualised, Meyerhof ’s Beyond Education (2019) makes the critical case that what we promote as education is not educational at all and that other alternative structures must be explored. There has also been a related call (see, e.g. Finlayson, 2021) for renewed interest in liberatory educationalists such as Illich or Postman who challenge accepted modes of formal ‘schooling’ as being a means of regulation. This book has a different focus in that it leaves the classroom, the seminar and even the community education hub altogether and argues that different forms of learning already exist which need interrogating. One of the problems that faces an exploration of learning in everyday life is the issue of naming. In thinking about this issue, I concluded that a new category ‘invisible education’ could be useful and productive. There has been ongoing

Introduction  7

discussion about the terms formal, non-formal and informal learning, and the consensus is that all these terms start to blur (see Hamilton, 2006). All formal environments contain multiple opportunities to learn informally in collaboration with others. Non-formal is usually taken to mean learning that has some form of structure but is not accredited and takes place in contexts other than mainstream education; yet organisations like community centres could still be deemed a form of educational structure. Informal learning tends to be seen as learning conducted for pleasure or the by-product of work, but this is sometimes structured too. Whilst boundaries are not fixed, it is still the case that boundaries exist. Although the learning I am interested in this book most closely resembles informal lifelong learning, the term informal learning does not seem to stretch far enough and is not sufficiently open-ended. By defining themselves against the formal, informal and non-formal categories emphasise lack and reinforce the norm. In Fifty Sounds the translator Polly Barton (2021) considers the kind of learning for leisure provided by language app Duolingo (which depending which way you look at it could be called formal, non-formal or informal learning, or all of these things at once). Barton compares it with the quality of education created by daily immersion in a culture. She evokes the everyday learner as a new sea swimmer; evoking the sea which will also pass in waves throughout my book: You learn the language in a way that the exam boards or the green owl want you to … If it makes language education accessible to those who might not otherwise have access to it, then that is surely a good thing … But … there is another, far less stable form of learning—a radium to duolingo’s lurid neon … It is a learning that doesn’t know goals or boundaries … the image that springs to mind is a lone figure wading gallantly into the sea, naked, without a single swimming lesson behind them. (2021, p. 19) I see this brave swimmer as enveloped in invisible education, which ‘doesn’t know goals or boundaries’. Using the term invisible education also highlights the way that everyday learning is ignored and devalued, especially if it is the learning of marginalised people. Finally using the term invisible education underscores its significance; it is not a sideline, but something fundamental and formative. Biesta (2015, p. 5) asserts ‘education is not just about the reproduction of what we already know or of what already exists but is genuinely interested in the ways in which new beginnings and new beginners can come into the world’. Invisible education is such a process, as I shall proceed to discuss: it does its pervasive daily work and should never be discounted. The book does not present an idealised or anti-intellectual discussion of invisible education, but one that sees it as a force for social justice, and also a possible conduit for dangerous forms of anti-knowledge.

8 Introduction

Theorising invisible education: learning affect and new worlds

There has been much valuable work on community-based learning, see, for example Evans, Karanrowiz and Lucio-Villegas (2022). This study investigated non-formal activities taking place internationally in diverse spaces such as museums, galleries, football grounds, pubs or prisons. Nevertheless, apart from adult literacy, it is difficult to find theoretical work within the field of adult learning that helps conceptualise the delicate and ineffable nature of everyday invisible education. It is also difficult to find posthuman work on adult learning beyond formal education. The following thinkers offer some ideas that I have found helpful in developing a posthuman theorisation of invisible education. In Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart (2007) explores the affective dimensions of everyday life, paying attention to the moments that we take for granted, unfolding their influence and the changes they provoke: The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges … Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion. (p. 2) She specifically mentions what she calls ‘learning affect’: Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation. (p. 40) Her use of the term ‘involuntary’ is a suggestive one. The implication is that simply by living our lives we are learning. In Ordinary Affects Stewart uses vignettes from her own life (but presented through the third person) to show how moments can spin off into larger understandings. For example, under the section entitled ‘learning affect’ she incidentally observes with unease a miner’s hands scarred by the stubbing out of cigarettes. This leads to seeing how his workmates do the same thing which finally reveals this gesture as a mark of a wider and shared solidarity. The small and the bodily affect, the problem of ‘why is this happening and what does it mean?’ ultimately teaches the abstract and the political. One of the challenges I face in this book is to move beyond my own experience to explore the workings of invisible education in the lives of others. This is difficult but learning affect gives me an important tool. Invisible education is unseen and difficult to pin down, just as affect is. Drawing on the concept of ‘learning affect’ I suggest that invisible education is not planned and objectives are not fixed. The learning is an involuntary but meaningful response that can happen when engaged in everyday life and activities and the questions and problems they provoke.

Introduction  9

Another the fertile theoretical source for this book has been Karen Barad’s work on ‘new worlds’. In harmony with Stewart’s idea that the ordinary every day is one of ‘continual motion’, Barad argues that reality is constantly being created and that there is no pre-existent stable human or any form of matter: Matter is agentive and intra-active-generative not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds. Bodies do not simply take their place in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in particular environments. Rather ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively constituted. (2007, p. 170) These new worlds which are constantly being created in life are learning worlds. The potential for invisible education is always immanent. I have previously used this idea to explore how adults commonly constituted as non-learners, such as unqualified young people in low-waged jobs produce ‘new learning worlds’ in their intra-activity with nature (Quinn, 2013a, 2013b). This is something that happens along the life course: the new worlds are not the preserve of the young. Similar phenomena occur in the intra-activity of people living with dementia and music. Although often positioned as beyond learning, they also enter into new learning worlds (see Quinn and Blandon, 2020). I will draw on these research studies and others throughout the book. The sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote to Ben Nicholson that she felt she was coming into a ‘new world’ after collecting stones on the beach with him (quoted in Baker, 2020). By piercing stone and invoking interior space, she made this new world her own (Figure 1). The new world is palpable, open to the touch, but also offers a revelation of what Braidotti (2013) calls potentia—hidden energy and vitality. Intra-activity constitutes stone as art and Hepworth as artist. Cracks make new life visible: Cracks. Cuts, breaks, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, conical intersects, disruptions, etymologies. Here’s another one I like … There was an artist named Gordon Matta-Clark. … He broke into Pier 52 and spent two months making cuts twenty to thirty feet long and ten to eighteen inches thick in the corrugated steel of the wharf building. Pie-shaped, sickle-shaped and elliptical cuts. He also cut through the floor to expose the water below. He said various things about these cuts. He liked the way light passed alive across the floor. He wondered how it would be to sit and watch this passage of light over a span of, say, a year. He wanted to make volume visible. He wanted to see the Hudson River sparkle inside. He spoke of ‘liberating’ the compressed force of a building simply by making a hole. He hoped to ‘retranslate’ the space into something he could ‘taste’. (Ann Carson, 2016, from ‘Cassandra Float Can Original Cut’)

10 Introduction

FIGURE 1 Author’s

photograph of postcard of Barbara Hepworth’s Pelagos (1946).

Such cracks and cuts inform this book. Bringing together Stewart’s idea of ‘learning affect’ with Barad’s ‘new worlds’ provides my conceptual lens for invisible education. It helps me to understand it as something pervasive, and part of everyday experience, the constant movement of affects, but also part of an ongoing process of creation. Learning is a fundamental component of this constant recreation of life, even for those who are commonly deemed to be nonlearners. It is not helpful to try to abstract the learning and quantify it, more to think about what is happening as an affective embodied experience: a productive resource that exists beyond the norms of the formal educational realm. In some respects, the book is an exploration of a galaxy of new learning worlds, uncharted, but worth visiting. It can hardly hope to be exhaustive of all the forms of learning that might exist beyond the beyond of formal education, rather can open a crack to uncover the space as one that researchers should acknowledge. Education is often seen as a distinct and somewhat limited realm of attention, but a focus on invisible education helps to clarify how deeply questions of learning impinge on every aspect of life.

Introduction  11

Critical posthumanism

In this book I will be engaging with critical posthumanism. Bozalek and Zembylas (2016, pp. 193–4) define it in this way, acknowledging how posthumanism builds on many diverse movements and does not spring from nowhere. They emphasise how a critical posthumanism particularly engages with issues of inequality: Posthumanism builds on the epistemological and political foundations of antihumanism, postcolonialism, post-anthropocentrism, anti-racism and material feminisms (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Blagaard and Van der Tuin 2014; Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012; Nayar 2014; Wolfe 2014). Critical posthumanism, in particular, embraces a critical view of a disembedded liberal humanism, with its assumptions of a society with equally autonomous agents and rational scientific control over others (Adams 2014; Donovan and Adams 2007). A critical posthumanism helps to think about and validate a focus on the affective rather than the tabulated when we consider learning. It breaks down assumptions about what it is to be human but also considers the impact of the structures that have emerged from humanism. As such it is aware of the dangers of thinking the everyday a wide open field of play and being over-affirmative. It can also benefit from insights in the adult literacy field that: the everyday world is by no means a wild moorland of learning …. It is colonised by powerful knowledge-making institutions and practices that jostle with one another to organise and enclose aspects of social practice: the mass media, medical and legal practices, religious organisations, businesses and consumers, workplaces, the family. Education is just one, specialised domain within this landscape. (Hamilton, 2006, p. 135) Increasingly those interested in posthumanism are turning to indigenous thinkers, who have challenged them to recognise that indigenous peoples already have long traditions of thinking differently about where and how knowledge and learning takes place (see TallBear, 2017; Todd, 2016). Developing approaches which learn from, rather than appropriate, knowledge rooted in place is one of the challenges for postqualitative researchers. Indigenous thinking must be seen as not just a well of ideas to draw from but ‘a body of thinking that is living and practiced by peoples with whom we all share reciprocal duties as citizens of shared territories (be they physical or the ephemeral)’ (Todd, 2016, p. 17). By acknowledging the significance of invisible education this book hopes to make a contribution to these debates. As a producer of knowledge, formal education is often the end point of discoveries that take place elsewhere: for example, in

12 Introduction

feminist or eco-campaigns. Ideas that now help shape mainstream debates on equality or sustainability did not originate in universities but in protests, in informal support and discussion groups and indeed in finding ways to live everyday life differently. Tamboukou (2022) uses the term ‘surging knowledges’, forces that are so powerful that they potentially sweep away old assumptions. Yet waves of new knowledges tend to move forward and then fall back losing their power: the tide goes in and out. Learning to know differently is not a passive process, nor is it linear or bounded with an assured result. It is affective and corporeal forged in urgent mattering. For these reasons, a critical posthumanism provides a fruitful approach to learning beyond the beyond as it openly welcomes such conditions but also considers limits and barriers. Yet critical posthumanism which is so fertile in exploring early years or Higher Education has been much less engaged with adult learning. The aim of this book is to demonstrate that invisible education and critical posthumanism are mutually productive. Critical posthumanism is considered an oxymoron by some, who argue that posthumanism was supposed to dispense with the stale academic habits of criticality. Harney and Moten (2013) reject the role of the critical academic as complicit and seem to suggest that the act of critique reifies the object of critique. However, to be critical of one’s own positioning rather than relentlessly dismissive of others seems a necessity. Critical posthumanism implies questioning as well as questing and as such best describes my own position. This asks how we came to be known as ‘human’, but also pays close attention to the lived inequalities which derive from that decision and is wary of any theoretical move that might obscure them. It is a position as much critical of posthumanism as of humanism. Knowledge sources

One of the aims of the book is to open the realm of enquiry for those interested in Education and indicate what might potentially be explored. The book draws on a wide range of funded studies: some large, some small and most involving collaborators. These are studies where diverse adults are experiencing what might be called invisible education including in nature, at work, in volunteering, in activism and in community arts. These include studies involving young people and nature, studies involving postverbal people and their carers, women escaping domestic abuse and elders living in care homes, a study of activism and its aftermath, a study of volunteering and a study of young people in low-waged work. This gives an indication of the variety of forms invisible education takes, but of course is far from exhaustive. The book will also make reference to my research undertaken in Higher Education and to events I have organised. Most of the studies took place in the UK, but I will also draw on my international research experience including in Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Beirut. Some of the later studies were undertaken from explicitly posthuman perspective, others were more traditionally qualitative but returned to with diffraction, looking

Introduction  13

through different lenses with different purposes. The overall perspective can be seen as postqualitative in that it does not assume that there is an object that can be interpreted and understood by an equally integrated subject. Instead it assumes everything is in flux, and that the research itself is a process of change and becoming for all involved (see Bodén, Ceder and Sauzet, 2021). ‘To move and conceptualize from within worlds is preferable to drawing a plane above them’ (Berlant and Stewart, 2022, p. 856). It is important that the book engages with the matter of this invisible education rather than simply conceptualising it. Indeed, the conceptualisation emerges from the material encounters. This might be considered a form of pragmatic posthumanism, in that the focus is on the practical consequences of ideas and on what ideas make happen and not on the beauty of the ideas in themselves. It is pragmatic in the sense that its concern is for the implications and limitations for everyday living and equality. Braidotti (2013), for example, is optimistically affirmative about posthumanism, but sometimes putting these ideas to work in empirical studies brings a sharp sense of the problems faced in making this affirmative vision materialise within contexts bounded by inequalities (see Quinn, 2013a, 2013b). The book re-engages with these studies not as a fixed set of data that will always tell the same story but as examples of diffractive reading. Here I diffract through notions of visibility and invisibility. What can be seen and what can’t; why is the invisible and the ineffable so important? In this, I am led by my work on the postverbal and the unspoken, inspired by research with people who communicate in ways other than words (see Quinn, Blandon and Batson, 2017, 2019). This research brought home the constraints imposed by understanding the human as a speaking subject, how this erases those who do not speak, effectively making them invisible. However, it is not enough to uncover them, as if by the simple act of seeing, others confer on them the mantle of humanity. Instead, drawn by their example, we must problematise how we understand the human at all. Similarly, claims to represent and essentially know others through research have been critiqued in postqualitative work. Bringing to light must not assume mastery. So, invisibility is a complex and slippery subject, but is useful in helping to think through the consequences of what is cast as invisible, unseen, an ‘unconsidered trifle’. The invisible education explored here calls into question why the formal sphere is valorised and the everyday ignored. By operating only with what can be seen, other different potentials lie fallow. As previously mentioned, the book will work with a different set of data acts which are memoirs, film, poetry, fiction, art and my own research diaries. I am using them as a heterogeneous resource for exploring learning within daily life; invisible unmarked traces that come to life in these texts. As Jamison says: When life becomes art, it can honour the disproportionate impact of those peripheral moments and figures which end up composing us—even if we have no ready-made language for their influence. (2022, p. 72)

14 Introduction

These are forms of writing which explore daily living but destabilise linearity, rationality and subjectivity. They are congruent with and helpful to posthuman, postqualitative work in troubling assumptions about what is significant or meaningful. The memoirs I draw on are those I read myself and which are therefore part of my own everyday invisible education. I particularly use memoirs and texts that question any idea of a fixed self but that are mutable and unsettled. As Ullmann (2021, p. 273) says in her memoir Unquiet ‘to remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time’. Such memoirs chime with a posthuman sense of time as spiralling and a restless resistance to any one truth narrative. Ullmann’s memoir is stitched together across time and draws on memory, fictionalised elements and tape recordings of questions she asked her father in very old age. Her father was the film director Ingmar Bergman and her mother the actress Liv Ullmann. This means that the text itself is overlaid with other unspoken memories and images from film: famous images of death playing chess on the beach, of the secret lives of children, of marriages unravelling. All find echoes in Unquiet itself, working like a Moebius strip. An interplay like this between the page and cultural memory helps to show how diverse our sources of learning are and how the accretions build. Bennett’s (2020) use of influx and efflux is useful in thinking with memoir and with invisible education. Here, the I is ‘a porous and susceptible shape that rides and imbibes waves of influx-and-efflux but also contributes an “influence” of its own’ (p. xi). Excerpts from my research diary echo this constant multiplicitous process of being in the world: I have just seen the documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. Vonnegut claimed that as a young man he had rested his head against a tree trunk in a wood and seen quite clearly the bombing of Dresden that he was later to experience as a prisoner of war in Germany, and which informed his writing. In Slaughterhouse-Five Billy Pilgrim is simultaneously in and across time and space including outer space, a tragi-comic suggestion that a linear lifestory is not possible. In the film Vonnegut claimed that his boyhood neighborhood dog had as much impact on him as the bombing of Dresden. This was seen as a typical example of his denial and black humour; but perhaps he was serious. Affects and influences are not proportionate or respectable. Toni Morrison: Pieces of Me, another documentary I also saw this week evoked a life that was also multiple but one that was consciously rooted in a shared black community, history, and culture. It was life with a purpose to do justice to this community, a life that could not be approached without this perspective. It gave another sense of a life lived on many planes and across time but always in relation. Both these films seemed timely in thinking how learning happens throughout life everywhere everyday: not logically, not chronologically but powerfully and pervasively and differently. ( JQ diary)

Introduction  15

Conclusion

Here at the water’s edge the hands drop memory; Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie (Hart Crane from ‘The Tunnel’) The everyday is where most learning takes place, but it is rare that this is systematically explored. In this book I try to cross this territory and encourage others to do so too. I have created the term ‘invisible education’ as a useful concept incorporating informal learning but going beyond, ending up beyond the beyond of Education, and into the worlds of marginalised people. Exploring these worlds reveals their everyday learning as powerful, but obscured, devalued and made invisible. Combining theorisations of learning affect and intra-actively constituted new worlds, reveals invisible education as pervasive, part of everyday experience, the constant movement of affects, but also integral to the ongoing process of creation. In the next chapter I develop the idea of future mutabilities as a riposte and alternative to that of social mobility. This also involves consideration of new forms of ethics that fit a non-individualised view of the human. The book is then organised around several themes and each theme will draw on a range of research data acts as well as memoirs, poetry, fiction, art and other texts of everyday life. Chapter 3, Invisible Others, explores relations of learning with non-human, more-than-human forms of matter including landscapes, animals, machines, things: including immaterial, uncanny and symbolic things. Chapter 4, Invisible Knowledges, is concerned with ways of knowing and forms of knowledge generated by actions including activism, volunteering and work. Chapter 5, Invisible Beings, considers how those who are postverbal and their carers generate invisible education in the home. Chapter 6, Invisible Communities, concludes the book by considering the duration and influence of learning and relearning in the invisible sphere and how this contributes to communities. References Baker, H. (2020). Put a fist through it. London Review of Books, 42(19), 33–6. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Barton, P. (2021). Fifty Sounds. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2020). Influx and Efflux. Durham: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. and Stewart, K. (2022). Some stories, more scenes. The Sociological Review Monographs, 70(4), 856–9. DOI: 10.1177/00380261221106513 Biesta, G. J. J. (2015). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Biggs, J. (2021). The palimpsest sensation. London Review of Books, 21 October, 7–10. Bodén, L., Ceder, S. and Sauzet, S. (2021). Editorial: Posthuman conceptions of change in empirical educational research. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.4215.

16 Introduction

Bozalek, V. and Zembylas, M. (2016). Critical posthumanism, new materialisms and the affective turn for socially just pedagogies in higher education. Special Issue, South African Journal of Higher Education, 30(3), 193‒200. http://dx.doi.org/10.20853/30-3-652 Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burdick, A. (2016). Present tense: how to think about time, The New Yorker, December 19 and 26, 68–74. Carson, A. (2016). Cassandra float can, original cut. In: Float. London: Jonathan Cape. Crane, H. (2002). Poems of New York. New York: Knopf. Didion, J. (2021). Let Me Tell You What I Mean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Durastanti, C. (2019). Strangers I Know. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Ernaux, A. (2001). Happening. London: Seven Stories Press. Evans, R., Kurantowicz, E., and E. Lucio-Villegas, eds. (2022). Remaking Communities and Adult Learning. New York: Brill. Finlayson, L. (2021). Diary: I was a child liberationist. London Review of Books, 18 February, 40–1. Frears, E. (2020). Shine Darling. London: Offord Road Books. Gale, K. (2014). Moods, tones, flavours: living with intensities as enquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 2098, 998–1004. Hacker, M. (2006). Essays on Departure. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Hager, P. and Halliday, S. (2006). Recovering Informal Learning: Wisdom, Judgement and Community. London: Springer. Hamilton, M. (2006). Just do it: literacies, everyday learning and the irrelevance of pedagogy. Studies in the Education of Adults, 38(2), 125–40. DOI: 10.1080/02660830.2006.11661529 Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions. Holdsworth, C. (2020). The paradoxical habits of busyness and the complexity of intimate time-space. Social & Cultural Geography. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2020.1769167 Jamison, L. (2022). Object lessons. The New Yorker, September 12, 70–3. Jones, S. (2018). Portraits of Everyday Literacy for Social Justice: Reframing the Debate for Families and Communities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Meyerhof, E. (2019). Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Moran, J. (2020). If You Should Fail. London: Viking. Neal, S. and Murji, K. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: sociologies of everyday life. Sociology, 49(5), 811–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803​8515​602. Oztok, M. (2019). The Hidden Curriculum of Online Learning. London: Routledge. Quinn, J. (2010). Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital: Learning to Belong. London: Bloomsbury. Quinn, J. (2013a). New learning worlds: the significance of nature in the lives of marginalised young people. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(5), 716–30. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2013.728366 Quinn, J. (2013b). Theorising learning and nature: posthuman possibilities and problems. Gender and Education, 25(6), 738–54. Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2020). Lifelong Learning and Dementia: A Posthumanist Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Batson, A. (2017). Beyond Words. Plymouth: Plymouth Music Zone/Arts Council. Saito, Y. (2017). Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Introduction  17

Staufenberg, J. (2022). The dismantling of a sector: adult education in crisis, FE Week. Available from: feweek.co.uk [downloaded 1 October 2022]. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. London: Duke University Press. Talbot, M. (2021). Is it really too late to learn new skills? The New Yorker, 16 January 2021. TallBear, K. (2017). Beyond the life/not-life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking, and the new materialisms. In: Radin, J. and Kowal, E., eds. Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Boston, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 180–93. Tamboukou, M. (2022). Keynote, Adventures in Posthumanism Doctoral Conference. Available from: https://adve​ntur​esin​post​hum.wordpr​ess.com/. Tett, L., and Hamilton, M., eds. (2021). Resisting Neoliberalism in Education: Local, National and Transnational Perspectives. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1). DOI: 10.1111/ johs.12124 1- ZOE TODD Ullmann, L. (2021). Unquiet. London: Penguin Books. Vanderbilt, T. (2020). Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. London: Knopf. Wright, J. (2022). Research Digest: Everyday Creativity. Leeds: Centre for Cultural Value, University of Leeds.

2 SOCIAL MOBILITY AND FUTURE MUTABILITIES

This chapter critiques the regime of truth of social mobility which underlies and shapes so much of formal education policy and practice in the UK. It argues that this is a pernicious form of bad faith which actually creates a smokescreen for stasis, and which ensures that change does not happen. In opposition, the chapter introduces the concept of future mutabilities and links it to everyday learning. Future mutabilities suggests that change can happen in multiple and unexpected ways and that learning is dispersed, not narrowly contained in formal spaces. The chapter argues that social mobility is a feel-good fiction, whilst future mutabilities faces up to difficulty and inequality. In this condition of fluidity, where rigid codes do not work well, research ethics need to become more rigorous: researchers need to replace the idea of ‘responsibility’ with a posthuman ethics of rights. This is illustrated with a focus on migration. Formal education is implicated in national memory, with topics described and prescribed to fit an agreed narrative, such as social mobility, whilst invisible education can act as counter-memory and a source of alternative knowledges, such as those produced by black and indigenous communities. Critiquing social mobility

To think about invisible education requires a challenge to some dominant and cherished ideas. In writing about invisible education, I came up against my frustration with the concept of social mobility, which in the UK has taken on the status of a ‘regime of truth’; as in a discourse that is accepted and ‘made to function’ as true (Foucault, 1977). Many things together create, protect and police this truth. The apparatus that makes the regime of truth of social mobility function is the system created by many different things: cultural narratives, media DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-2

Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities  19

images, government bodies, professional regulations and so on. This truth is so pervasive and so acceptable that to oppose it becomes treasonable and unthinkable. It is part of everyday language, so that when it is spoken it is widely understood. When a body advertises itself as ‘a social mobility charity’, everyone knows what they mean and everyone knows that this is a ‘good thing’. The concept of social mobility is ubiquitous in government rhetoric and in some parts of the educational academic community. In theory, social mobility can mean horizontal or downward movement of groups or individuals across society (Sorokin, 1927), but it is dominantly employed to denote escape from unfortunate origins. Social mobility presents what seems like an uncontentious and desirable good: that those at the bottom of society should be allowed and facilitated to move up, and that education is a key lever in this process. Many worthwhile activities are organised under the name of social mobility: challenging this discourse risks being positioned as a ‘feminist killjoy’ (Ahmed, 2017) who does not appreciate positive change and does not want disadvantaged young people to progress. Nevertheless, Ahmed’s feminist killjoy manifesto states: ‘I am not willing to be included in a system that is unjust, violent and unequal’, and so, social mobility, which acts as a legitimation for inequality, must be resisted. If we look beneath its smooth surface, it is apparent that social mobility is fundamentally conservative: making pathways for the ‘exceptional’ and the ‘talented’ minority but leaving the status quo unchanged. It accepts that there will always be inequality and implies that the ‘top’ is where value lies. Social mobility is too useful an idea for the government to reject as it props up inequality whilst seeming to tackle it. As part of this apparatus the UK government has created mechanisms such as the Social Mobility Commission and the Social Mobility Tsar. The commission seeks ‘to create a United Kingdom where the circumstances of birth do not determine outcomes in life’. ‘Circumstances’ is an interesting term suggesting chance or random effects that might be magically overturned. It has an Oliver Twist ring about it. The commission focuses its attention on raising the achievement of those who have the bad luck to be born poor, whilst paying no attention to the structures that ensure those born privileged will remain so. It leaves the instruments of social division, such as private schools, firmly in place. From 2022 to 2023, the Social Mobility Tsar was a woman commonly known as ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher’. The school she runs has many forms of control but one of the most interesting is that those pupils whose parents are late in paying dinner money are made to sit separately in the dining room. They are thus stigmatised and a line drawn between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor: a mode symptomatic of the social mobility regime. Another aspect of the social mobility apparatus is that any ideas that challenge and run counter to it must be resisted. The UK government has declared that teachers should not teach and use critical race theory, as have many states in the USA. Critical race theory demonstrates that society is institutionally racist, and that this racism perpetuates the privilege of white people. It also points to the existence of ‘community cultural

20  Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities

wealth’ (Yosso, 2005), suggesting that knowledge and value are not the preserve of elite universities but are plentiful in black communities. As such, critical race theory is a powerful counter-argument to the dogma of social mobility and must be blocked by those in power. There are very many facets of this regime of truth of social mobility; one is that if you do the right thing it is always possible to be mobile. Todd (2021) has used life histories to challenge this notion. Not only is social mobility hard, with those at the top working to prevent others from joining them, but social mobility is not the universal motivator it is taken to be. For many it is a desire to make society more equal for everybody that drives them, not personal ambition to rise up the ladder. Another facet of social mobility is the belief that once you are socially mobile everything is open to you. There are numerous studies that show how even the apparently socially mobile are still stratified and marginalised. In their large-scale study of those working in elite jobs in accounting, television, architecture and acting Friedman and Laurison (2020) revealed how those from a privileged background were automatically assumed to have ‘talent’ because of their classed self-presentation and were promoted by work cultures and informal networking shaped by the privileged. Those without these ‘circumstances of birth’ experienced a ‘class ceiling’. Some pieces are redistributed on the chessboard but the rules remain the same. The problems caused by social mobility are not only symbolic but also material. It leaves parents scavenging for scraps of advantage for their children. It creates self-hatred amongst young people. If mobility is so possible, why aren’t I mobile, why aren’t you? There is nowhere else to go but to label yourself as part of ‘the thick bunch’, to use the words of one of the young people in our study of those in low-waged, low-status jobs (Quinn, Lawy and Diment, 2008). Instead of mobility, with supports given to help a minority across the lumpy social terrain, we need a fundamental transformation of the landscape. The pandemic has challenged accepted notions of value and worth whilst revealing how deep social division goes. Social mobility is a weak response to this crisis. The tools for social transformation do not come from government bodies positioned at the top of the pyramid, they come from ground level social movements such as feminism and Black Lives Matter. Here the roots of oppression and inequality can be uncovered and with them other ways of organising and understanding society. It is not only about learning to read but what you read and what you learn. Director Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series on BBC brings this to life in the episode Education. Here supplementary schools founded by activists not only provide literacy support for black children unfairly removed from the mainstream but also access to hidden black history. A university has a double role in this shifting ground between mobility and transformation. It may reproduce social norms and buy into the myth of social mobility and such initiatives as widening participation can be seen as part of the apparatus; but it also provides space where they can be challenged. It is what Gillian Rose calls a ‘paradoxical space’ (1993, p. 159). Part of the role of

Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities  21

academics is to interrogate comfortable catch phrases like ‘diversity’ and ‘social mobility’ to uncover the work they are doing. For all the good intentions of very many involved, the work of social mobility is ultimately to provide a smokescreen for stasis: ‘the promise of social mobility to sugar the pill of inequality’ (Moran, 2020, p. 62). Claiming to believe in it is a classic example of bad faith. Future mutabilities

In response to ‘social mobility’, this chapter proposes the alternative concept of ‘future mutabilities’. This posits the human and the world and learning as perpetually moving and changing in multiple forms of relations, not simply in a hierarchical or linear way. The writer Hisham Matar (2019, p. 36) seems to conjure this inexorable sense of movement in his memoir of loss and grief: The past and future stimulate our imagination, the present overwhelms it. What is there to do with this ongoingness that neither pauses nor tires, this ceaselessness that is like a blinding light flickering so rapidly that the naked eye cannot perceive its reverberations … somehow we know, as the minutes pass, that we are being quietly made and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Invisible education is implicated in this ‘ongoingness’; it is part of daily life and not a separate enclave. It is shaping us but with no fixed goal. This corresponds well with posthuman interest in the now. Instead of focusing on education as a means of gaining advantage over peers, future mutabilities ideally looks to learning that benefits all elements of these relations, human and more than human. It allows for much more fundamental transformation of inequalities and recognises that these are not just changes to the social order but cultural, imaginative, digital as well as material. Like Harney and Moten’s (2013) future mutabilities goes beyond the beyond, to a world, where it is not inevitable that universities exist; still less that it is the goal of everyone’s life to enter one. However, potential changes are still subject to systemic constraints, so the nature of future mutabilities remains under question and is not free; unlike social mobility, which assumes that with education everything is possible. To proceed with future mutabilities in mind, the researcher must make a concomitant shift. Social mobility is individualistic in nature and it promises a human that can be perfected by education. Knowledge belongs to humans and it is found in certain places. To acquire it means leaving behind other forms of knowledge from the home and the community. The losses this brings as well as the gains have been widely charted in academic research, but this vignette from writer Geoff Dyer is particularly vivid and poignant: On my final year at Oxford I came home unexpectedly and turned up at my old primary school where my mother still worked in the canteen. She opened the

22  Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities

door in her dinner lady’s blue uniform. We both started crying and embraced eachother. We held eachother because we both had an inkling that part of my education was to understand that it was more than just education. (2011, p. 317) Future mutabilities suggests that there are no certainties, and learning can happen in ways and places that are still unknown. Similarly, knowledge cannot just be codified or stored in a repository. Future mutabilities requires an open and alert vision to the ‘ongoingness’ of life. The relationship between researcher and where, how and with whom knowledge is being created becomes fluid. This opens the field of Education in dynamic ways and surfaces hidden relations. In an age of pandemics the significance of mutation cannot be escaped and we know that these changes are not necessarily for the good. I introduced the concept of future mutabilities to colleagues on a day when the new Omnicron mutation of Covid-19 was confirmed. I could not suppress a wry smile or the comment that this might not be the day for them to take this idea to their hearts. Social mobility is a simplistic feel-good story, future mutabilities is not. It does what Haraway (2016) demands: it ‘stays with the trouble’. Posthuman ethics of rights: learning affect

In this condition of fluidity, where rigid codes do not work well, research ethics need to become more rigorous. In discussing research ethics, the importance of responsibility, of doing no harm to participants, is axiomatic. Posthuman writers have paid close attention to the renewed responsibilities of their position in moving the human from the epistemological and ontological centre, weaving a posthuman web of ethical responsibilities (Barad, 2007). Yet the term ‘responsibilities’ itself seems to suggest a knowing figure who might be culpable of being unjust but is never themselves the victim of injustices. There is a trace of Colebrook’s (2016, p. 16) ‘master thinker’ in this assumption of the mantle of responsibility. Pushing the human from the centre might imply that all who occupy that position are equally privileged. What happens to the already marginal human? Alaimo’s (2010, p. 22) use of ‘toxic bodies’—in her case women with breast cancer—is one helpful response. Here the marginalised human is brought back to the centre not as the bounded figure of traditional human rights discourse but as a fulcrum of myriad more-than-human systems and practices. Toxic bodies may provoke material trans-corporeal ethics that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated evolving practices that have far-reaching … consequences for multiple peoples, species, and ecologies.

Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities  23

In response I have previously suggested a relational ethics of rights: Here all forms of matter (whether they are human, animal, plant, mineral) have a right to actions that protect their survival and promote their flourishing. All those that have the capacity to take these actions must do so. Universities would provide unique contexts and mechanisms across disciplines to explore the ramifications and the applications of these principles. (Quinn, 2021, p. 697) Furthermore, those who are positioned on the margins would have the right to take their place in the university and to share their knowledge. This posthuman ethics of rights aspires to the position that Todd (2016, p. 9) suggests she already inhabits as an indigenous person: my reciprocal duties to others guide every aspect of how I position myself and my work, and this relationality informs the ethics that drive how I live up to my duties to humans, animals, land, water, climate and every other aspect of the world(s) I inhabit. Thinking about migration has been illuminating in regard to thinking through ethics. Migrants are treated as ‘toxic bodies’, so much so that the British government plots to ship them to Rwanda and store them there, rather than risk them polluting British soil. Responding to narratives about migration and the way that whole continents have been cast as waste and ‘shitholes’ by ignorant politicians, Erpenbeck (2020, p. 186) writes about refugees, borders, blind spots and global connections. She admonishes all of us who think we inhabit any position of superiority or mastery: ‘for we were made of dust and to dust we shall return. In other words; we, you and I, come from shitholes too’. In his essay ‘Ethics’, Teju Cole (2021, p. 196) is also driven by encounters with migration and the knowledge that no one stands outside and above the migrant journey. ‘The numbers will only rise and will come to include some of us who don’t expect to be included’. Since he wrote this, those unexpected numbers of course include migrants from Ukraine fleeing Russia and migrants from Russia fleeing the country it is becoming. Cole (2021, p. 197) calls for ‘directness as a form of ethical knowledge’, an affective response to what we see and hear about the lives of those living these journeys: I feel compelled to consider what it might mean to abandon the conventions of ‘raising awareness’, of what it might mean to commit to the more dangerous work of bearing witness. The one who merely raises awareness can still pretend to neutrality, while the one who bears witness has already taken sides. (p. 197)

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Bearing witness and not a studied neutrality should thus become part of the ethical practice of research. Dziadosz (2022, p. 42) suggests that migrants and refugees in Germany have become unwilling totems, asked to stand for suffering and providing the opportunity for others—including academics—to act out their virtue in a ‘carnival of well meaning’. My discussion of ethics was prompted by an African migrant begging in the streets of Italy; someone who dared me to enlist him in such a selfserving carnival: In Italy on a fellowship to research ‘the humanist university in a posthuman world’, a wonderful academic opportunity but the most lasting lesson came on the streets. There were several migrants who appeared daily begging in the streets of the hilltop town with its ancient university. One always seemed to be somewhere at the corner of my vision, in a way that seemed to me uncanny. He would appear from behind a pillar silent and moving slowly. Seeing him generated waves of anxiety, shame and also fear of what seemed to be his power of accusation. His burning eyes and face of fury demanding a response that went well beyond money. This affect was not ‘pure’ it was shaped by numerous narratives from film or television where a peripheral figure suddenly exacts a justified revenge. Again and again, I return to this scene reading it diffractively. There is no fixed I or him but there is learning. I learned that he was demanding his rights not my ‘kind’ acts of responsibility or my ‘white tears’ and that these rights extended to the university. Thanks to him I thought differently. I wrote my article, I write this book and for him, as far as I know, nothing improves. I do know, however, that another migrant begging was subsequently kicked to death, in daylight and full public view, in a nearby Italian seaside town. This was a town where I had lived very happily many years ago. ( JQ diary) Canadian activists Indigenous Action (2014) famously call for accomplices who stay and fight, not allies who sympathise and leave. I cannot claim to be such a person. Instead, the lesser claim is to be an accomplice to my research, in that rather than act the role of the responsible adult, I will defend the rights of the participants to be respected and recognised. In all the research projects in this book there were complex ethical issues to address and no easy answers. The ethical questions revolved around issues of visibility and invisibility. For example, in Feeling Their Way (Quinn and Blandon, 2014) research with women escaping domestic abuse and living in a refuge, it was vital not to disclose to anybody the location of the refuge or the identities of those involved. It was key not to harass participants and add to the stress of their situation. It was their non-negotiable right to survive more than our responsibility to follow formal ethical procedures. In conducting research with participants who do not communicate with words in Beyond Words (Quinn, Blandon and Battson, 2017) their rights demanded that the assumed

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primacy of words be discarded. All posthuman discussions about ethics suggest entanglement, mutation that cannot be made neat and separate. Learning becomes part of that unpredictable process of change. Alternative knowledges

If formal education is implicated in national memory, with topics described and prescribed to fit an agreed narrative, such as social mobility, invisible education can act as what Foucault (1980) calls ‘counter-memory’. It is unmoored to a system which must justify itself and paint history as its rationale to be able to function as it is. Counter-memory suggests that the world can be known differently, that history is not immutable and that present conditions were not inevitable. It looks back through a different lens and offers hope for those whom the dominant narrative excludes and marginalises. It is against nostalgic memory of the past. The current wave of decolonising activity is an act of global counter-memory, which acts against nostalgia. A pertinent example would be the death of the queen in the UK. Nostalgia and inertia justify her hereditary rank as ‘royal’: of different and more precious blood than any other person. It legitimates her vast wealth and the position of influence which she wielded to protect her own interests. It sanctifies deference and subjugation. Memory casts a glow over her coronation and makes her a custodian of the past. Counter- memory uncovers the acts of violence and suppression that worked to set up and sustain her throne and unpicks the threads of nostalgia. It mocks the vapidity and complacency of official memory. One of the difficulties faced by those seeking to activate counter-memory to decolonise the curriculum in universities and schools is that formal education itself mitigates against change; it solidifies that which should be liquid and flowing. Recognising that there is already a different fund of knowledge in other contexts is vitally important. Black thinkers have made this argument decisively and influentially. Yosso (2005) uses the term ‘community cultural wealth’ to express all the reserves of knowledge held by the black community that are either ignored or disparaged and asks who really has ‘cultural capital’. Harney and Moten (2013, p. 26) signify the ‘undercommons’ which exist in all universities, ‘where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted’, where all the fertile thinking happens amongst marginalised groups in unremarked exchanges and relations that bypass formal structures. For indigenous thinkers, knowledge may not be passed on by written words but by artefacts and by oral traditions and myths expressed through art. Songlines the Seven Sisters exhibition which toured internationally was an example where Aboriginal knowledge about land and history was brought into the confines of mainstream art galleries and museums; but threatened to burst out of them with the vitality of its paintings and straw figures. Collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous thinkers are helping to rewrite countries and how they understand themselves. One such example is the collaboration between Gibson and Blacklock (2022) seeking to decolonise how the history of plants

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in Australia is written. By thinking about an everyday education that produces invisible knowledges, I hope to contribute to this ongoing conversation about alternative forms of knowledge. In the next chapters I explore some manifestations of this invisible education that I have engaged with in my work, recognising that this is not, and never could be, all encompassing. Conclusion

In this chapter social mobility has been critiqued as a smokescreen for stasis which acts as a regime of truth. Education needs another discourse that responds to the possibility of radical and unforeseen change, and which is not tied to an individualistic human subject. The chapter proposes future mutabilities as means of conceptualising education and social futures as forms of entanglements that are fluid and ever-changing. It posits relations not between inviolable humans looking for self-advancement but for relations of human and more than human, potentially working for common good but also potentially dangerous. Learning is an integral part of future mutabilities, especially invisible education, which is not set into any fixed shape but responds to the questions and problems of everyday life. In order to move towards this, a posthuman ethics of rights needs to replace an ethics of human rights and even a posthuman ethics of responsibility. The process of conducting research under a logic of future mutabilities and exploring invisible education must draw on alternative forms of knowledge as proposed by black and indigenous thinkers. References Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Alaimo, S. (2010). States of suspension: transcorporeality at sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476–93. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Cole, T. (2021). Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd. Colebrook, C. (2016). What is the anthropo-political? In: Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, Cohen, T., Colebrook, C. and Hillis Miller, J., eds. London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 81–126. Dyer, G. (2011). On Being an Only Child. Working the Room, Edinburgh: Canongate Books, pp. 309–21. Dziadosz, A. (2022). I wouldn’t say I love Finland. London Review of Books, 24 March, 42–3. Erpenbeck, J. (2020). Not a Novel. London: Granta. Foucault, F. (1980). Language, Counter-Memory Practice. New York: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Friedman, S. and Laurison, D. (2020). The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to be Privileged. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Gibson, P. and Blacklock, F. (2022). The herbarium: coloniality, indigenous knowledge and the Eucalyptus. Presentation at Phytogenesis 11 Online Symposium: Provocations of Plants, Philosophy and Photography, 23 March. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions. Indigenous Action (2014). Accomplices not allies: an indigenous perspective and provocation, Version 2. Matar, H. (2019). A Month in Siena. London: Viking Penguin Random House. McQueen, S. (2020). Small Axe. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/pro​g ram​mes/p08vx​t 33 Moran, J. (2020). If You Should Fail: A Book of Solace. London: Viking. Quinn, J. (2021). A humanist university in a posthuman world: relations, responsibilities, and rights. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(5–6), 686–700. DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2021.1922268 Quinn J. and Blandon, C. (2014). Feeling Their Way. Available from: https//plymou​thmu​ sicz​one.org.uk Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Batson, A. (2017). Beyond Words. Available from: https// plymou​thmu​sicz​one.org.uk Quinn, J., Lawy, R. and Diment, K. (2008). Young People in Jobs without Training in South West England: Not Just ‘Dead-end Kids in Dead-end Jobs’. Exeter: Marchmont Observatory, University of Exeter. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity Press (Social Mobility Commission—GOV UK). Available from: www.gov.uk/gov​ernm​ent/organi​sati​ons/ soc​ial-mobil ​ity-com ​m iss​ion Sorokin, P. (1927). Social Mobility. New York: Harper and Brothers. Todd, S. (2021). Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth. London: Chatto and Windus. Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1). DOI: 10.1111/ johs.12124 1- ZOE TODD Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. DOI: 10.1080/ 1361332052000341006

3 INVISIBLE OTHERS Land, Animals, Machines and Things

This chapter works with future mutabilities to discuss the ways in which the more-than-human world plays an important role in invisible education. This will begin by exploring everyday engagement in landscapes amongst marginalised young people. It will then discuss how animals play their part in invisible education, for young people, very old people living with dementia and postverbal people. The normalised centrality of machines to invisible education will be explored across the studies. The chapter will consider the importance of the thing to invisible education, and explore this with reference to research with women and children using music to transition from domestic abuse. Drawing on research with older people living in care homes, the chapter will consider the significance of the ‘immaterial thing’, such as the song. The notion of the thing will also be extended to ‘uncanny things’ and those who are able to tap into them, such as people living with dementia. Finally, it will draw on research with activists involved in Occupy to discuss how symbolic things play their part in everyday action and learning. Introduction

Invisible education is a constitutive element of the world, and so this chapter will explore the multiple relations in which it is entangled. Come to me, said the world. I was standing In my wool coat at a kind of bright portal— (Louise Gluck, 2006, from ‘October’)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-3

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The writer Dorthe Nors, travelling along the North Sea coast in Denmark, commands the spirit in which to take this journey into the world: Let the day turn, let the car sail. Feel your freedom, if you have it. Raise yourself above the unsolved riddles and sink into your seat …. If you have a voice, sing now. You are alone. Sing! Let the darkness recede, the space atomize. You are with all the wildfowl that stand still. You’re in Thy now so sail in it. (2022, p. 170) At one with machines, voices, space, atoms, animals, future mutabilities explore relations across the human and the more than human. This terrain is where postqualitative researchers and critical posthumanists have made important moves. However, as Todd (2016) and TallBear (2017) argue in doing so they have mostly neglected indigenous forms of knowledge: we should remember that not everyone needs to summon a new analytical framework or needs to renew a commitment to ‘the vitality of [so-called] things.’ Indigenous standpoints that never constructed hierarchies in quite the same way can and should be at the forefront of this new ethnographic and theoretical work. (TallBear, 2017, p. 193) ‘Indigenous peoples consider identity to be the product of a co-constitution of human and nonhuman communities’ (TallBear, 2017, p. 185). Moreover, this identity is not amorphous but situated in ways that are familiar to critical posthumanists: their emergence as particular cultural and language groups in social and cultural relation with nonhumans of all kinds—land formations, nonhuman animals, plants, and the elements in very particular places. (TallBear, 2017, p. 186) The climate crisis and the pandemic have forced everyone to engage with the relationality of human and more than human, not just academic theorists, as the interdependence of multiple forms of matter plays out in deadly ways. As Todd (2016) argues it is indigenous activists who have led the global debate but: it is easier for Euro-Western people to tangle with a symbolic polar bear on a Greenpeace website or in a tweet than it is to acknowledge arctic Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems and legal-political realities. (2016, p. 6)

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One of the key points in studying the relationality of human and more than human is that the sense of Nature as a separate realm of transcendent experiences, but also of dirt to be avoided, is an artificial construct and one that helps prop up humanist ideas about human exceptionalism. Nature/culture is one of the key binaries set up by humanism and is profoundly gendered, so much so that in 1983 feminist artist Barbara Kruger sent out the message on behalf of women: ‘We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture’. Greater awareness of non-binary and transgender lives complicates this message still further now. Although the term ‘natures’ still has utility in describing globally diverse phenomena such as fields, rivers, trees, ‘Nature’ as a construct is not helpful. Thinkers such as Haraway stress kinship between species not difference, and research which locates humans as part of a multi-species continuum is making important strides, for example in the field of dementia studies (see Jenkins et al., 2021). Artists revel in this connected community. For example, in ‘We Live Here’ performance artists Ann McKay and James King celebrate multi-species vitality, numerating and channelling all the creatures living in, below, above and around Derry, Northern Ireland. It is interesting to place the concept of future mutabilities beside the term sustainability. Mutation is hardly desirable when it comes to a virus, but pretending things will not change is not an option. Sustainability, on the other hand, seems to suggest how can we keep going, how can we preserve what we have? Sustainability is a feel-good buzz word which cloaks the drama of the climate crisis. Institutions including universities vie for the title of most ‘green’ without radically changing their ethos or values. They engage in what Alaimo (2016) calls ‘sustainable this, sustainable that’, without challenging the ontological primacy of the human. Paradoxically, the most disposable item in the sustainable university is the human; liable to be made redundant at any point. The competitive field of education, martialled by ranking systems that are ever more arcane, consumes human energy much faster than it cuts electricity consumption. Everyday learning in nature

The world writes stories and lessons. ‘Again and again I held the negative up to the light, reading the white thin scrawl of this row of trees in England … this winter script’ (Kinsky, 2020, p. 267). Different sets of relations and different ways of understanding them need to develop. The posthuman new materialist field provides many rich and powerful tools for this rethinking and, given the admonishments outlined earlier, is now working to: credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations, and with climates and atmospheres as important points of organization. (Todd, 2016, p. 7)

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Bennett (2010), for example, explores how all forms of matter share the same vibrant force which means that everything has meaning and must be respected and considered. Alaimo (2010) sees the world in terms of transcorporeality, so that, for example, the human body and the sea are not distinct entities but share, mingle and exchange life. Springay (2022) develops new understandings of human/material encounters through her walks with stones. Tuck (2019) senses her ancestors as living beings when standing on the cliffs of her homeland so that past, present and future collapse. Manning (2023) works with theories of blackness to explore what forest clearings in Canada have expressed and erased. Learning to think in this way seems to emerge from daily and informal engagement with nature: Bennett and Springay’s walks, Alamo’s swims, Tuck’s wanderings and Manning’s labours. It is a process of immersion. There have long been records such as the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008) that show such daily immersion in nature and the lessons learnt. These journals in turn have provided inspiration for creative writing in urban grassroots groups in Liverpool as they commune with Dorothy Wordsworth: Wild-eyed walker student of botany, and poverty; collector of moss, planter of peas… (Shirley Jones, 2015, from ‘Writer, Sister, Friend…’) Feminists have learned to value Dorothy’s everyday encounters and to challenge the assumption that they are inferior to her brother William’s search for the romantic sublime. However, it is also instructive to reflect that Dorothy was deprived of the formal educational opportunities experienced by her brother and felt the loss keenly. She, like Alice James, the sister of Henry James, took to her bed in passive resistance to these exclusionary norms of femininity. It is vital that invisible education is recognised, without suggesting that it supersedes access to formal education altogether. Otherwise, we will find invisible education declared enough for some, but not for others, thus perpetuating a hierarchy that it should break. Invisible education with the land

The fact that trees have been giving us the Ol’ Silent Treatment for two million years, but maybe there’s more going on in them than we thought … the fact that trees do go into a dormant state at night, the fact that if trees sleep. Perchance they dream, and I wonder what their dreams are about. (Lucy Ellmann, 2019, Ducks, Newburyport, p. 715)

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Despite all the important work of posthuman thinkers, in educational contexts there is still a tendency to perpetuate views of Nature as a discrete category. Outdoor education exists as a distinct field which stresses the utility of nature for wellbeing and respite, or as a tool for cognitive tasks, and which focuses on formal or semi-organised activities. Leisure and adventure activities outdoors are being employed as pedagogical sites, for example providing sailing for people with special needs, but again this is organised and structured. Invisible everyday education in a more-than-human sphere is rarely explored. This chapter will explore invisible education in nature amongst those widely considered to be ‘uneducated’. It will specifically draw on three studies involving marginalised young people in southwest England, their engagement with invisible education, how this acts as counter-memory for these young people and how these studies reveal future mutabilities as both potentially open and materially boundaried. In Barad’s (2007) terms, discursively constituted young people are not negotiating with a socially and culturally constructed representation of nature; neither is an eternal nature suffering the imprints of the fixed bodies of humans. Rather the intra-activity of young people and water, trees and birds produces new phenomena: new worlds and new bodies. The first of these projects (Quinn, Lawy and Diment, 2008), funded by the European Social Fund, was a study of young people in low-waged, low-status jobs. The project was conducted in collaboration with the career advisory service Connexions. One hundred and fourteen young people were interviewed once, and then 68 interviewed again over the space of 1 year by Connexions staff trained by the research team: 27 interviews were conducted in person by the project researcher, with some young people interviewed twice over a year, plus a focus group with young people. All the participants were white and mostly, but not all, from working-class families. All the young people chose their own pseudonyms which will be used here. Although there were concerns that the young people might be inhibited in engagement with the Connexions staff, in practice they were just as critical of their experience of schooling as they were with the project researcher. The significance of their engagement with nature was not anticipated but proved to be an important aspect of the project and led to posthuman thinking and writing (see Quinn, 2013a, 2013b). The second project (Merchant, Waite and Quinn, 2013; Quinn, 2018), funded by Exmoor National Park, built on the first by exploring how young people living in an area with the official status ‘of outstanding natural beauty’ engaged with nature in their everyday lives, using a series of focus groups and visual activities. Again, all participants were white. The third of these research studies (Quinn, 2018; Waite, Waite, Quinn, Blandon, and Goodenough, 2016), funded by the Campaign for National Parks, focused on those young people who were deemed not to be engaging on national parks and so were specifically targeted for activities as part of a national project entitled Mosaic. The research involved national surveys and focus groups, but here the chapter will use local research with a small number of young people who were BAME, refugees or

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unemployed. They took part in a workshop on using photographs in research, took photos of their activities in the park and made commentaries on them followed by interviews. This was substantially different from the first two studies, as it focused on formalised activities, rather than exploring everyday engagement with nature, yet responses to learning in nature were similar across the three studies. There were a group of young people in the second research study who belonged to the ‘Young Farmer’s’ organisation, a conservative social group who saw their livelihood and family as inextricably linked to the land. Apart from this group, the young people in our studies were unlikely ‘nature-lovers’ and yet intra-activity with woods, seas and animals sometimes played a vital role in their lives. It was striking, for example, how often the young people in low-waged jobs, who had all done badly in formal education, found opportunities for skill, freedom and autonomy outside. The young people in this study were those considered by themselves and others as the ‘thick bunch’. Mostly from working-class families, they were those who did not see any potential for social mobility, who had frustrated their teachers by rejecting formal learning and gaining their satisfactions elsewhere. For Jane, school was a smothering and restricting experience which she bodily rebelled against. She wanted to be outside: I don’t know they (school) kept on and on and harping at me. I didn’t want to be at school. I wanted to be at home at the farm outside. Outdoors was a zone of freedom from formal education but also of expertise where she had many skills that her teachers would not know about. It showed that there were other possibilities beyond being an obedient schoolgirl. One was to be a beater: scaring birds into flight in advance of a shooting party. Whatever one might think about this activity, there was pride in doing it as a job usually reserved for men. In fact, flouting the judgement of the urban and liberal may give Jane an added sense of power. In comparing herself with someone from the city who had to be taught how to beat, Jane seems to emphasise that for her as a rural young woman such skills were everyday and accessible from a young age: There can’t be many other female beaters? No, there’s not. There’s a girl that comes down from London, someone’s girlfriend, and I thought: ‘Oh my God is that her going to beat?’ So, she knew what to do? Not really no. But she learned … How old were you when you first went beating? Fourteen, I suppose … but it’s different, isn’t it? ( Jane, face-to-face interview) There are multiple femininities which are in turn classed and raced. Which ones have legitimacy depends on context but only some will reap material rewards or

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social respectability. What can Jane do with being a strong rural young woman whose labour is mostly at the services of a class denoted as middle or upper? Where will it get her in terms of formal progression in society? Nevertheless, this invisible education influences and affects her perception of what is possible and gives her bodily satisfaction and pleasure in her own efficacy. These things are not nothing, indeed they mean more to her than GCSEs would. Invisible education fosters a different set of values. In discussing this research in various contexts, it was interesting to note that people working in schools often found it difficult to acknowledge such engagement with nature existed at all. One head teacher roundly declared that none of the children in his school spent time in nature, otherwise he would know about it. Others pointed out to him that the secret and private nature of this invisible education was precisely the point. These engagements were often fragmentary, snatched between more regimented times and slipping below the radar. I think of my own daughters too, diverging through woods and fields with friends on the way home from school, taking moments out. Only recently have I realised how significant these detours were in the well-mapped day. One of the insights of posthuman writing has been a reworking of linear time so that value and validity of experience is not tied to length or logical sequence. This is a point I will circle back to when discussing people living with dementia. The young people in these studies were enmeshed in mutabilities and movement when they were in nature, whilst at the same time stuck in states of entropy in the job market or schooling system. Sometimes the contrast was a learning experience. For Stevi, it highlighted the barriers faced when you are young and unemployed and produced a clear-eyed picture of how society was functioning. His words seem even more prophetic 7 years on: It’s freedom, isn’t it? You’re on a lake. You’re surrounded by people, everywhere you go, like from school, from like, like when you’re young, from when you’re a young child to, even now it’s the same thing where you’ve got people dictating what you do, where you go, how you act, what you say, but like on that lake … Like, it felt like, it felt like there would be no-one to tell you off for standing up on the boat. I’d like to go into the middle of Exmoor, I’d like to just go somewhere. But you try convincing your mates to go … they’ve no way of getting there, no money or any time, because they’re working three jobs, so … And it’s going to get fewer and fewer because more people are going to have to work more jobs and more hours to get less. (Stevi, interview) Stevi constructs nature as a space of freedom and openness, but the freedom he feels is partly determinant on his whiteness. As Ayamba (2022) argues in ‘We walked England before the English’ the historical presence of black people in the

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English countryside, for example as occupying soldiers in the Roman army in the first century: … remains a neglected and unwritten history …, rural Britain is often popularly perceived as a ‘white landscape’, predominantly inhabited by white people. The supposed purity of rural areas juxtaposed with the urban is aligned with racial degeneration and segregation, resulting in a contested sense of ownership and belonging. (2022, p. 40) In line with this contestation of ownership, the colonial history of the countryside has become a lightning rod for culture wars in the UK. An important report commissioned by the National Trust (see Fowler, 2020) exploring and exposing the colonial histories of its country estate properties became the target of press abuse and resistance from some trust volunteers and members. Who belongs and who has rights is a perpetual source of conflict, even, and especially, in spaces seen as pure and unspoilt. Although nature was not white, young black people in the third study knew that nature was: I think it depends, I mean, some people can judge you, obviously being a person of colour, on Exmoor it’s a little bit strange, um [pause] and some people, I think once you get talking to someone then they’re, then they’re sort of, they’re not as closed, um, but I think that people, honestly, are thinking ‘erm, what are you doing here?’, sort of, which isn’t very nice, but I kind of just like look past that and just realise that ‘I have as much right to be here, just as you do’ really. (Hephzi, interview) Thinkers working with posthumanism are trying to disentangle and retangle the colonial histories of land and learn how to see it differently. In Out of the Clear, Erin Manning (2023) seeks to recover what has been erased by colonial clearing in Canada. Higgins and Madden (2020, p. 294) stress that working with indigenous ways of knowing can help educators recognise ‘the ways in which land is alive, agentic, and relating through a plurality of “voices” ’. Thinking with the more than human and through the medium of the photograph, young people in the third study such as Stevi (Figure 2) brought the invisible histories of place into view, but a history that was imagined as much as real and always moving on: So, it was more kind of like a look back on history, it was a weird thing. Like, like you could imagine because there was a radar station there as well, so you could imagine the people there, looking out, in their binoculars, looking out for crafts going out across the sea, or aircraft, or whatever and then looking back now and, same place, still remnants of history, but it’s moved on

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FIGURE 2 Stevi’s

photograph.

A secondary meaning is like, we’re stood here, we’re chopping trees, out there is a vastness of like, everything … But that there [referring to photo] is kind of like, space to me kind of, like there’s really like, how insignificant although we kind of perceive how these trees will help the eco-system—But how will the eco-system survive if we keep on polluting and then we have global warming and other things, set of an ice-age, you know all those kind of things, or a massive tidal wave. How insignificant this is to the bigger picture? Stevi thinks both backwards and forwards and out into space. A sense of future mutabilities infuses his intra-activity with place. Having already unpicked the social mobility narrative from the perspective of working-class precarity, he understands land as unstable and part of an ever-changing cosmos. Land gave young people opportunities for freedom and escape, skills generation and expertise; but this did not mean that the new learning worlds they inhabited produced an unthinking sense of wellbeing. Land was paradoxical, entwined with the social and discursive and materially produced by inequalities and dangers. It made them think about the world they lived in, as well as giving them pleasure, and both were part of their invisible education. Invisible education with more-than-human animals

Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal. (Maggie Nelson, 2009, Bluets, p. 15)

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It is well known that during the pandemic many people turned to animals: acquiring dogs as pets, watching animals on daily walks or on social media, seeking comfort, play and status. Dogs were ubiquitous: I kept joking about my standing in front of a luxury salon that specialized in grooming pure-bred dogs … ‘The city’s fucking doomed’ I repeated. ‘We’re suffocating it with rich puppies’. (Veasna So, 2021, Afterparties, p. 203) The pandemic also heightened awareness of the mutuality of human and animals where the killing and eating of wild species was posited as a cause of Covid-19. Cutting and Passy’s (2022) collection is important in considering the pedagogical role of animals, bringing animals into education as a deliberative act. However, in the context of this book the focus is rather on animals in everyday life and how they are an important aspect of invisible education. Animals have always provoked philosophical questions such as ‘do dogs have habitus?’ once posed to me by a student. Thinking with animals potentially disturbs humanist epistemological hierarchies: The animacy hierarchy … refers to the greater and lesser aliveness attributed to some humans over others, and to humans over nonhumans. Indigenous standpoints confound the Western animacy hierarchy. (TallBear, p. 180) Posthumanism also challenges a hierarchical view of the world where humans are placed at the top and everything else exists to be at human disposal. Animals interest posthuman thinkers profoundly, Haraway (2016, p. 1), for example, exhorts us to understand and treat animals as our kin: ‘the task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die with each other in a thick present’. Transdisciplinary networks such as the multi-species dementia network make this a vital field of intellectual enquiry. In terms of doing educational research, Pederson (2010, p. 3) asks ‘what happens to education and learning when the human subject is decentred and nonhuman animals are allowed to emerge as subjects, rather than objects, tropes or species representatives?’. Following on from this, what part do animals play in invisible education? What does it mean to learn with and from rather than about nonhuman animals. What kind of learning experience do they set in motion? ‘Learning’ in this context may be perceived as essentially a convergence of energies. (Pederson, 2010, p. 7) For Barad the energies would not just converge but create new worlds. So how can we understand these new learning worlds that the intra-activity of human and non-human animal produce? In terms of affect, Ringrose and Renold (2016,

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p. 225) argue: ‘Affect is a way of thinking about how subjective experience leaks between one person and another … and it is also more than human’. This leaking can thus also happen between human and animal and the question here is what learning is emerging from it? The studies with young people give some opportunity to explore how animals and humans are woven together; although it is important to stress that animals are always present in the lives and constitution of humans, even if not visible. For young people in low-waged jobs, animals were sometimes key in the everyday learning activities assisting in the acquisition of skills: I’ve got two dogs now. One is a spaniel, and well I was completely barmy, I got this sheep dog. A collie? Yeah, it’s got a long coat actually and she’s eating absolutely everything Will you keep her as a working dog? Yes, she’s quite good actually. I am trying to train her and she’s not too bad. I’ve seen her (another farmer’s) dogs, and ours is nearly as good as most of hers. At least she comes to us, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? That’s what you want. Most of hers just clear off. ( Jane, interview) If we diffract this through the eye of the sheepdog, there is a sense of the power of the animal, the irresistibility of the collie which compels Jane to get her, its vitality and hunger but also its submission and obedience. Jane responds, is drawn into the zone of the dog and its affect, but is apart enough, enmeshed enough in the social world, to use the dog as a marker of pride and distinction. Reading with critical posthumanism we cannot diffract into an idealised pre-social view of animal/human. Humanism has created a world where animals are made use of and the ways in which this happens must be understood as well as resisted. Mariam Motamedi-Fraser (forthcoming) argues that dogs are treated differently than other animals, they have become positioned as close to human and are given the characteristics of an ideal human. This seems an acute observation but also culturally specific; having observed the packs of street dogs in Sarajevo for example, which are certainly not given this status. For John, who felt uncomfortable with people and pushed to the margins by his family’s poverty, his dog was more kin than any human, his companion in escape to the woods. The animal was both his choice of companion, and not his choice, as human structures, his family poverty, his positioning by others as semi-criminal, had precluded any successful human interactions for him: No, I can’t work inside really because I think I can’t get on with it … I hate it. I can’t do it. I kept myself to myself … I had to walk away from trouble because I’ve got a shotgun license and I don’t want to lose it.

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Do you fancy going off to Manchester or Birmingham? No, I wouldn’t fancy that … too big … It would be too big a place for me. I wouldn’t enjoy it because I feel I would want to be able to get out. Because you still like the countryside? Yes, I like doing that all the time … Dogs, doing the shooting side, and all. ( John, interview) The intra-activity of John/animals/wood created a precious new learning world for him, an everyday sphere of mastery and comfort, his retreat. Young people living in the ‘area of natural beauty’ in the second study had insider knowledge of animals generated through their everyday life. This was knowledge of the animal and of the place of the animal in the world around them ‘on your doorstep’: Joe:

And what you see as well, like I saw an adder in the summer, and see deer at least 2 or 3 times a month. It’s just, that wildlife is just brilliant, you know, you don’t know, wherever I’ve been it’s just there, on your doorstep, just keep seeing it. Oh, and lizards. Laura: I think, living here, when I did my Countryside Management degree, I did get frustrated with some people on my course who were very much about loving all the cute and fluffy animals, and it’s just like, it’s not like that in life. Laura: It’s about knowing (Focus group) Meaningful knowledge came from everyday ‘life’ not from formal education. They see animals randomly and it always gives a jolt of pleasure. Animals are ‘in life’ not on a screen or a page. It is about ‘seeing’ but also ‘knowing’ how they are. Animals are not just an amorphous cuddly mass, there are distinctions and histories that shape the interdependence of animals/humans. Learning about animals came from everyday invisible education, and similarly the lessons animals taught about human life were ongoing. In her work on learning affect, Stewart (2007, p. 40) talks about ‘expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation’. For these young people these were everyday problems like: where should the animals be, how should wild animals and livestock be protected, when is it right to kill? This was how their invisible education with and through animals progressed: Joe:

You understand that an animal can be good or bad and not just ‘Oh there’s a little rabbit!’ Andy: I don’t mind the ponies up there, the ponies are fine, they’re part of the landscape, they’ve been here for millennia. Cows, no. Keep them in the fields.

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Tom: But there’s also preservation of the healthy animals. Nobody wants to see all the badgers wiped—of course you want to see badgers, you want to see the healthy ones and then you will have healthy livestock and healthy cattle herds, but it’s really, really heart-breaking for a farmer to lose, to cull from his herd, just for the sake of some infected badgers. (Focus group) Animals teach difficult lessons about food and death which put the young people into a different space from those who live lives only aware of humans. They are faced with ethical questions which people living in environments considered to be human preserves prefer to avoid. All humans have intimate connections with animals, many of them invisible. For these young people the invisible always comes into sight, taught by animals themselves: Tina: We know where milk comes from! Like, a lot of people wouldn’t know how to turn a sheep up. Lucy: Yes, whereas other people just take it for granted ’cause they don’t understand, they just buy it from the supermarket. Joe: I think, coming from here you sort of think, it’s not so, you know, black and white, you can’t save every little creature in the world, it’s a bit more—I don’t know—it’s just not so clear-cut … Laura: Like hitting a bird on the road, they’re going ‘oh, let’s pet it better’ it’s like, no, let’s wring its neck and get on with it. (Focus group) Animals also figured in the Beyond Words study (Quinn, Blandon and Batson, 2017) funded by Arts Council England. This study was a mixed-method longitudinal study of 16 months of music making with 25 people who had dementia, acquired brain injury, autism or learning difficulties or were the survivors of strokes. The unifying factor was that they were all deemed to be ‘non-verbal’. The research explored their experience of music sessions run by community music organisation Plymouth Music Zone (PMZ) that were held in residential care homes, centres for learning difficulties and PMZ base. The research methods included daily ethnographic observations of the music sessions experienced by the core participants and 44 in-depth interviews with family members and care workers. Four focus groups were organised with music leaders and volunteers. Finally, 30 arts workshops were held with participants so that they might actively engage in the study and express their responses to music through postverbal means. The study was explicitly designed as posthuman and developed approaches such as a posthuman observation framework with a series of prompts. All involved in the study have been given pseudonyms. In Quinn and Blandon (2017, 2020), we focused specifically on people living with dementia who had participated in the research. We argued that they were not

Invisible Others  41

beyond learning (as is often assumed) and considered the diverse ways in which they were learning every day. People living with dementia had entered in a new form of relationality with the world. Peter observed of his wife Stella: She is living in a different world to that which she was, therefore, it is all new to her so therefore what I think are her likes and dislikes no longer apply. I have learned an awful lot because of those sorts of things. Previously Stella had feared and hated all forms of rodents, now when ‘the guinea pig lady’ brought the animals to the home Stella enjoyed letting them crawl all over her. She had entered in a form of kinship and learned to see them differently, this was a learning experience for Peter too. So, you know you look at people that have got dementia and you think you know: ‘they’re gone’. But you know we don’t know, not even the best experts don’t know exactly what they do know, what they can understand … no one can be in their head can they? In thinking and talking about people living with dementia and what they know the figure of the octopus came into view (see https://adve​ntur​esin​post​hum. wordpr​ess.com/, Quinn and Blandon, 2021), probably inspired by its emergence in posthuman texts as well as more popular books and programmes. The octopus is mysterious, but we now know more about them and have a renewed respect: we know that they cultivate gardens and sometimes they will take a diver by the hand and lead them there. By following the lead of the people living with dementia, we not only learn about them but gain new perspectives on the more-than-human world around us. Other participants in the Beyond Words study also led us to the more-thanhuman animal. One of the people with learning difficulties, Tim, was 40 years old, could speak very few words and mainly communicated through signs: I mean I suppose we are used to him being like this and that is how he is. You know I sometimes, I sometimes wonder if he could talk what would he tell us? He is more keen on the dog really than anyone. He loves animals and he loves dogs most of all. JQ: Does he talk to the dog? He does, he does, but what he is saying I don’t know we don’t know, but he does he gets down and puts his head against the dog’s head and he is you know murmuring something to the dog, but I have no idea what it is, but he does. (Barbara, Tim’s mother, interview) This intimate mind-melding of Tim and dog speaks to the potency of human/ animal intra-action and reveals the channel for communication that humans could

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not provide Tim, however much they wanted to. In our study we decided that the term non-verbal was pejorative, implying a lack and deficit. Instead, we coined the term ‘postverbal’ to try to express that communication was happening in different ways. It seems that sometimes animals were a conduit for this alternative communication. The invisible education happening for Tim here was perhaps understanding the commonality of human animal and non-human animal, in ways that exceed the capacities of most speakers. The refrain of not knowing and the impossibility of knowing, but also the acceptance of the mystery, runs through Beyond Words. It seems like an important part of invisible education to accept uncertainty: the epistemology of the ineffable mentioned in Chapter 1. Invisible education with machines

Since Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1991), it is common to understand the posthuman as a machinic assemblage. The everyday body has become part metal, part plastic, part digital, in the form of implants and as extensions. Everyday invisible education incorporates the machine in multiple ways. In fact, machines are so closely woven into the world that they no longer register. For a long time, I believed that my research had not touched on technology at all, had avoided it perhaps, when in fact it was there all the time. Some things can be so visible they become invisible. In the Beyond Words study the vibrant power of machines to make things happen ran through the observations. The touch of a finger on a tablet brought life, like God’s finger touching Adam in the Sistine chapel. Although Robert was in the late painful stages of dementia, when he touched a tablet and made music his expression said, ‘How wonderful’ and transported everyone else in the room. The intra-activity of finger and machine also created the following new learning world for Tim: He held the tablet on his lap and turned it gently round. He got his hand close with a long finger, like daring to touch something hot … It was wonderful to observe the tension in his body, in his hands, how much he wanted his fingers to touch the screen. It was powerful to see his leap too. He just … went for it and he could not go back afterwards, he continued touching the screen and exploring the sounds it made. (Tim, music sessions fieldnotes) As previously discussed, Tim did not speak to humans. He preferred to stay in his room watching Dr Who, listening to music and sorting postcards, all done simultaneously: not that different from other male geeks and nerds perhaps. The research enabled a witnessing of his body-object relationality where the machine spoke much louder than a human voice. The machine made a sound, and this drew him back to it almost against his will.

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There are numerous other examples of everyday intra-activity with machines that form the substance of invisible education. Young people who could not learn in school restored classic cars and replaced books with engines. Activists combined pavement protests with social media ones. Young people with autism found resources for music making on YouTube, older people in care homes connected to their past through songs on the radio but also displaying their vitality in the here and now in intra-action with machines: ‘One lady was playing drums on IPAD and teaching others how to do it’. For participants in all the studies the machine was not separate but intrinsic to their world and to the invisible education of their daily lives. Invisible education with things

The experience of being hailed by ‘inanimate’ matter—by objects beautiful or odd, by a refrain, by a piece of cake or a buzz from your phone—is widespread. Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things. (Bennett, 2020, p. 78) The enactment of relations with things may hold deep, hidden social and political meanings as Stepanova realises in her memories of sekretiki: Anyone who lived in 1970s Russia will recognize … the game of sekretiki or ‘little secrets’—the passion of my childhood … the ‘little secrets’ were kept under the ground like treasure or dead bodies … to make a little secret you had to drop down and press yourself against the earth. Choose a place, dig a little hole, look around and check no one is watching, put in the precious object, cover it with a piece of scrubbed clean glass and then put the earth back over … it mow feels to me as if the little secrets filled with the ‘outlandish’; a concentration of the burlesque, forbidden beauty, crystal beads, cut out paper roses, became political refuges, crossing both state and other boundaries. (Stepanova, 2017, pp. 343–5) It is not that the thing represents something abstract, but that its materiality, its excess of sparkliness, feel and colour, constitutes a forbidden new world. Indigenous and posthuman thinkers have alerted us to the significance of things and the salience of relations with objects in our everyday life. According to Bennett (2010), all forms of matter share vitality and vibrate with it, they all have ‘thing power’. There is nothing that does not speak or be affective. In her autofiction, Kinsky evokes objects as forms of communication, passing messages to us in our everyday movements. ‘The uneven cobblestones seemed eager to imprint on the soles of my feet like tactile writing’ (2020, p. 200). Affects are flows of influence not just between people but amongst human and more-than-human objects and these affects are learning affects.

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Insights from memoir illuminate the ways in which objects are woven into everyday life and into our invisible education. Annie Ernaux’s (2018) collective autobiography The Years tells a communal story of women’s lives in France, about class, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, employment, politics, music and food. As such, it runs counter to an individualised humanist view of the self as bounded, autonomous, essentially different from all others and positioned above other forms of matter. Moments and objects comprise the fabric of this mosaic and generate powerful shared learning experiences of living through history. In Having and Being Had, Eula Bliss (2020) shows how she has learned about class, money, property, social stratification and inequality. This is not by formal education into grand narratives, but by situated acts like buying a washing machine or cutting a hedge. The lessons are primarily embodied not abstracted ones and objects play a key role. Dragging a duvet too heavy to wash at home around launderettes, getting it dirty on the ground, getting coins back from broken machines, provokes a lesson in time, money and precarity: I think of all the time I spent in my twenties not having money, Not having money is time-consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinic, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company … My adult life, I decide can be divided into two distinct parts—the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after. (p. 42) The role of the thing within formal education is increasingly explored, and attention is paid to how spaces and objects determine the educational experience. For example, within her research on higher education, Taylor (2021) focuses on kitchens, and the play of objects within them, as helping to produce values, norms and belonging in the institution. In methodological terms, posthuman researchers such as Renold (2019) work with participants to create totemic things such as the ‘ruler skirt’ which convey messages far more effectively than words can: in this case experience of, and resistance to, sexual harassment in schools. What role do things play in invisible education? One obvious example is the hobbyist or collector who may have no degree but advanced knowledge of their specialist subject. The knowledge comes from immersion in and love of the thing it is not an abstraction. Our local historian in the small harbour village where I live, who collects maps, photos, tools, ropes and maritime relics and lives surrounded and enfolded by them embodies this thinginess. In all my research studies the potency of the thing spoke out. Community-based arts projects still happen even though funding is so difficult to find to sustain them. Seen in the light of invisible education, they form a web of learning opportunities that exist beyond the educational establishment, and they are often working with the most marginalised of people. They are not

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understood as education but much learning happens. They are a bridge to invisible education, to beyond the beyond of formal education, and simultaneously draw on the invisible education of their participants. In Feeling their Way, Quinn and Blandon (2014b), funded by Youth Music, conducted research with women and children using community music in transition from domestic abuse. Here, the thing vibrated and its affective role in such invisible education is clear. This research worked with women who had fled abusive partners and were living in a refuge. The refuge priorities those who are at high risk of extreme violence and its occupants have been referred by other agencies. Women may come from other cities and parts of the country to be safe. The refuge itself is seen as a space for transition. It is where families stay whilst they are waiting for other issues such as housing to be sorted out. The research explored the work of PMZ in bringing music sessions to them. It included 6 music sessions involving a total of 6 mothers and 10 children aged from under 1 to 9 years old and interviews with a small number of mothers and children, plus 4 refuge workers, the music leader and a professional filmmaker who had been hired by PMZ to produce a film about the project for fund-raising purposes. Most of the research participants were white but the refuge did often house black, and minority ethnic women and one was involved in the study: she told me how she felt as a foreigner in the refuge and in Plymouth. She explained that she felt judged or criticized by some residents in the shelter. She told me people treated her and spoke to her differently (some would speak loudly and more slowly to her) and that made her feel uncomfortable and angry. (Observation fieldnotes) The women living in the refuge are often called ‘pyjama mums’ by the staff. Many spend their days dressed in nightclothes apparently doing very little and without the energy or will to engage. The reasons why they have difficulty participating in any activity and are apparently stuck in this moment of stasis are not difficult to understand. Research suggests that they will be experiencing the after-effects of a long process of attrition, where they have been worn down by constant criticism, control, violence and even the threat of death. Dynamics between the mother and children can be very dysfunctional with the child blaming the mother for their past experiences. Fear of judgement bedevils all their actions. Even within the refuge they are still subject to observation by multiple authorities such as social work and the police, which is why an activity such as music can provide release from regulation: When you’ve gone through a life where you’re always in the wrong and always being told what you are doing is wrong, to be able to do something (the music sessions) and not have anybody dictating or putting you down and what you’ve done, that’s nice, that’s a nice feeling. (Kate, resident, interview)

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Music may have been sadly lacking in the lives of women and children living in the refuge: in abusive homes they have been deprived of their right to hope and dream. The project worked with them in an effective way, tuning in to the atmosphere of loss and reworking it. It was subtle and every day, working indirectly to conjure up the possibility of a new world. The families living in the refuge often had to run away from violence without planning ahead: Generally speaking, they’ve had to leave a lot behind and children and particular if you get a chance to talk to them will tell you about things they’ve had to leave behind that they’re sad about. (Refuge worker interview) For these reasons, PMZ not only organises music sessions, but produces tangible objects such as small musical instruments and a CD of the children’s own songs. Our interviews suggested that these objects are valued and seen as precious. In this respect and many others, the project was highly sensitive to the needs of the families it seeks to help. One of the most expressive moments witnessed during observation was participants making their own beautiful musical instruments: The Music Leader (ML) started the session with making music instruments. ML had brought wooden spoons in different sizes that had two holes in their bowls. Afterwards, ML laid markers on the table for children to draw on the spoons as they pleased. With some supervision and help—when requested—children drew what they wanted and used as many colours as they wanted … After the children were satisfied with the colouring of their spoons, ML offered them shiny stickers to put on the spoons if they wanted to, ML had brought in several sheets and instructed children to use as many stickers as they wanted as long as they did not cover the holes in the spoon’s bowl, because they need the holes accessible for the next step. Most children used stickers and with some help were able to follow the instructions. Suddenly, one of the children, a boy who had been very engaged in the activity, started singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ when he saw the sparkling stickers, the other children joined in … After the children finished with the stickers, ML gave them a piece of string, again asking children if they like a specific colour. ML instructed children to thread the string through the holes in the spoon. Next, children were instructed to choose different beads and insert them into the string along with some small bells at the end of the string. Once children were content with the number and colour of beads and bells, adults helped them secure them by knotting the ends of the strings. The same child who started singing before stared singing ‘Jingle Bells’. (Observation)

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In this observation the object provokes responses for the children; frees them up to sing. It creates waves which spread around the room. The careful attention of the music leader and her respectful way of allowing their choices also created a condition very different from the oppressive environments they were accustomed to. These were children who were subdued, used to being told what to do and effacing themselves. Singing and making musical noise were not freely available to them. The object provided a release. These delicate but powerful creative objects helped them to recapture how they felt during sessions and carry this through to their future lives. It was poetic that these were humble domestic objects, simple wooden spoons, that the children could transfigure themselves, suggesting a possibly new and open domesticity: She’s made the little shakers so she’s got five or six of them at home and we do (makes shaker noise) because we have a little bit of a samba dance in the lounge … we play with the saucepans, just messing around, things we would never have been allowed to do and it does give you a real buzz like we laugh so much when we’re doing it … (Lucy, resident, interview) The thing produces waves of affect. The lost object calls the child back, but the new spoon offers some hope that there is a creative way forward. Spoon of the empty belly, Spoon of the full one. Spoon of no-one Hungry. Spoon for everyone. ( from ‘Spoon Ode’, by Sharon Olds, 2016) One can easily imagine the argument that what these women need is skills training, what the children need is to be in school with their peers. They need to start to climb the ladder of social mobility. This neglects the trauma they have experienced and the sense of helplessness it has engendered, as well as the sytematisation of gender abuse that also exists in the formal educational sphere. To change the conditions of their life they must be able to imagine that they are worthy and capable of a better one. In making this change material resources, such as housing and employment, are fundamentally important but so too are less tangible resources for survival, accessed through everyday invisible education. Audre Lorde (1984, p. 37) uses the word ‘poetry’ to express the power and the necessity of all art forms, including music: Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more

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tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The tangible and the intangible are held in the hand through the power of the created talismanic, yet everyday, objects. Through the thing power of the spoon new learning worlds emerge. The immaterial thing

The book did not close on the story, and the story remained present in the room while I was reading the book and for many days after, as if it were loose in the room, had floated up from the pages, and hung there under the raftered ceiling— the woman’s sullen illness, the thrashing of the wild palms and the prison where the man sits, the high wind, the wide river the man can see out the cell window, the frail cigarette that he can’t roll tightly because his hands tremble so badly. (Lydia Davies, 2015, The End of the Story, pp. 100–1) What constitutes a thing? There are many entities that cannot be touched but they can still be counted as things, not human, not animal, not matter, but they too have a power and play a role in invisible education. One such thing is the story; another is the song. Another research project co-conducted with PMZ was entitled The Power of Songs (Quinn and Blandon, 2014a). This used posthuman ideas to explore how older people living in care homes responded to taking part in singing groups, and to the making of ‘keepsakes’ in the form of recordings of their singing. We were interested to see what songs made happen for the older people in our study. This small study involved 10 participative observations and 19 in-depth interviews with participants, care workers and music leaders. Becoming absorbed in the world of the song began to have a pervasive effect on the co-researcher Claudia Blandon. It was not touchable, but it had palpable ‘thing power’: After attending and observing these sessions for over one month, I have noticed that days later after sessions, I suddenly remember a song and its melody; which I find surprising because I have never been musically trained nor have I ever considered myself good at singing. More extraordinarily, I started to dream about singing and composing songs. (Reflective diary) What were ‘a few of their favourite things’? As part of the project we noted from interviews and observations the songs that the older people loved and enjoyed. These were some of the examples: • Hello Dolly. One resident in this home shared the story that her late husband used to call her dolly because of her petite frame, and they both enjoyed the

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song. Every time this song was played the above-mentioned woman, moved her hands vigorously and rhythmically throughout the song. This song triggered many discussions in different sessions about stories attached to that name in relation to residents’ family members and friends. • Obladi Oblada. This song triggered many comments and was engaging. People who are usually quiet or unengaged like to sing it or make comments after the song finished. In one session, it triggered a conversation about Dad’s Army and people reminisced about how much they enjoyed that television show. Even a lady with a stroke who cannot speak made an inaudible attempt to say something. (Observation, fieldnotes) Songs seem to offer participants a chance to celebrate their own survival, often against the odds, as in the interviews they described accidents that had happened when they were young or more recent troubles such as leg amputation. Looking at their favourite songs supports this idea of resilience. For example, Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, an up tempo, slightly risqué and probably racist Beatles song has the chorus ‘la la la la life goes on’, and Hello Dolly has the refrain ‘you’re still growing, you’re still going strong’. This celebration of still being alive was powered by the song and the celebration could even continue past death. The woman whose favourite song was Hello Dolly died during the research, but the residents remembered her favourite song, requested it and sang it to bring them from their sombre mood, so they could talk about her, her life and what she liked. It was a link across domains, a thing that could be manipulated and used. Some songs were almost too powerful to bear: The song ‘Always on my mind’ seems to move some residents as manifested by their active shaking of their tambourines, that otherwise, would be used very softly. Some residents seemed to stare differently for a couple of seconds, while that song is being played and sung. (Participant observation) Music is such an emotional thing that it’s OK to realize that sometimes words will trigger something. The song ‘Always on my Mind’, sometimes, I can’t sing that because it overwhelms me, because I’ve seen other people break down at it or just suddenly remember, or I’ve actually seen someone shaking their tambourine quite strongly at the end of that song almost every time. ‘Yeah’, I thought ‘I bet he’s thinking of someone and he’s saying hello to them at the end’. (Music leader, interview) In projects like this it is the arts workers and researchers who do most of the learning and they learn that everyday invisible education has been happening all along:

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These are all people with families and stories it makes you think about your own family … it humbled me a bit in my attitude to getting old and people wanting to keep their youth. (Music leaders focus group) We very quickly realised that it was not a question of the music group bringing songs to older people, but rather that songs had always played a key role in their everyday learning lives. ‘We’ve got a lot of history behind us in age and music’. Some of the residents interviewed had been active in music and performance throughout their life, for example one had sung with the British Legion, one had been classically trained and sang with the Salvation Army in the Albert Hall and Fairfield Hall, one had been a Go-Go dancer and one, who was blind, could still play the piano and keyboard very well. Their tastes were wide and ranged from country music, classical, pipe and drums, African choirs, barbershop and popular crooners. It is a mistake to assume that for those involved music is a new experience. Even those who saw themselves initially as non-singers without confidence in their voice had a rich heritage of love of music and knew songs unfamiliar to the music leaders. They also had things to teach the researchers such as the history of the barbershop quartet. Through their leisure activities and daily pleasures a rich seam of knowledge had developed. A posthuman perspective alerts us to the bodily experience of knowing something like a song. The following interview shows how the song transports the person across time. It is a sensory celebration of a lost personal, cultural and historical moment, made immediately accessible through the song: Another good favourite of mine is My Way by Frank Sinatra—it just sort of hits you and when you hear it (gasp) you feel your insides jump and the back of your neck, the hairs on the back of your neck, do you know? Does it bring back specific memories that trigger that? Nothing specific. It was played an awful lot when I had a partner … he was in the Royal Navy and he was sent to Iran, he was on board the ship keeping watch from the sea, you know and we used to send each other tapes while we were apart and that was one of our favourite ones. You know you put it on in the evening and got candles around you, you’ve had a nice dinner, you sit down and perhaps have coffee and a little brandy, you put some mellow music on and that would always be one of them. So that reminds me of that period of time which was at the time lovely, but unfortunately for a number of reasons it had to fizzle out. (Resident, interview) As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 166) suggest, the song reconfigures time: ‘even if the material only lasts for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist

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and be preserved in itself in the eternity that exists for that short duration’. The immaterial thing is invisible but it ‘exists for eternity’ and although unseen is part of the complex web of invisible education. As suggested in Chapter 1, the singer can be an important companion in the learning journey through life. The example of the song of course provokes reflection on the role of popular culture in invisible education. Songs, films, TV programmes, memes, music videos, podcasts, graffiti, sporting events, all shape understanding of the world, pervasively influencing ways of thinking. Tett and Hamilton (2021) have opened debates on lifelong learning and popular culture in productive ways, by arguing for the positive signs offered by online learning breaking spatial and temporal boundaries, movements like Black Lives Matter foregrounding new perspectives and histories, and new social justice partners such as footballers breaking down ossified notions of rank and expertise. Researchers such as Mendick, Allen and Harvey (2015) in their work on celebrity culture have shown the formative educational aspects of the popular sphere. Franklin-Phipps and Smithers (2021) show how resources such as films can provide ready access to the cultural richness of blackness, and be deployed in anti-racist pedagogy. The digital realm has radically changed consumption of such immaterial objects so that they are accessible constantly. YouTube or TikTok also provide endless resources for selfdirected learning creating multiple communities of learners and teachers. Sadly, such invisible education is also the realm of what Mackenzie, Rose and Bhatt (2021) call ‘dupery by design’ where misinformation and miseducation is rampant and the media have become fragmented into outputs with narrow self-justifying viewpoints and concerns. This flow of information constantly available night and day becomes a saturating force which is very difficult to counter through the confines of the formal education system. Bad lessons are only too readily available. For example, right-wing podcasts disseminate post-truth, racist fictions to ever larger audiences or self-declared ‘incels’ spread misogynistic conspiracy theories against women (see Ging and Siapera, 2019). Invisible education is both a space of social justice and of dictatorial repression; but the same might be said of formal education too. Uncanny things

When you lean over the edge of the rock and see something lovely and brilliant flashing at the bottom of the sea it is only the clear trembling water that dancesbut-can you be quite sure? No, not quite sure, and that little Chinese group on the writing table may or may not have shaken itself awake for just one hundredth of a second out of years of sleep.

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—in the white bookcases the books fly up and down in scales of colour, with pink and lilac notes recurring, until nothing remains but them, sounding over and over. (Katherine Mansfield, 2017, Journal, pp. 78–9) Sometimes objects have an uncanny power, they are there but not there in a potentially disturbing way. There can be an uncanny dimension to everyday life and so to invisible education. The idea of invisible education overall implies something that is there but not there, something hard to grasp. As Bennett (2020, pp. 78–81) suggests in her work on hoarding, the object can have an uncanny power which exceeds any rational conception of its utility, and hoarders are attune to this wavelength. Leone Hampton’s (2011) photographic memoir of her mother, Bron, In the Shadow of Things, evokes a beauty in the hoarder and her hoarding which is almost otherworldly, as well as familiar and every day. In her novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki explores the disturbance of things in the life of a grieving woman who is hoarding and her son who is receptive to the uncanny voices and affects of objects: Things speak all the time, but if your ears aren’t attuned you have to learn to listen … Sometimes it’s more than one voice. Sometimes it’s a whole chorus of voices rising from a single thing, especially if it’s a Made thing with lots of different makers … Sometimes it’s not so much a thought as a feeling. A nice warm feeling, like love for example. Sunny and warm. But when it’s a sad feeling or an angry one that that’s laced into your shoe, then you’d better watch out. (2021, p. 4) The object is uncanny, but it may also lead us to a broader social understanding. Its affect is a learning affect, provoking questions and problems: where did the shoe come from, why does it create this sense of anxiety? The participants living with dementia in the Beyond Words study were alert to the uncanny realm: Robert often extends his hands in front of him, as if he were trying to reach something, to pick up something. He always looks down trying to collect that ‘thing’, beyond his reach. I see that in other residents too. (Observation fieldnotes) Thinking about the effects of music and the new worlds it creates suggests that it connects to that uncanny realm. As a music leader says in an interview: ‘I think music haunts people, doesn’t it’. Some posthuman researchers try to respond to the call of the uncanny thing: MacLure (2019) configures the feminist posthuman researcher as a witch and Renold’s (2019) ruler skirt as a magical object. Indigenous

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people pay close attention to what exists at the corner of the eye: without a boundary between what is real and not real, dead and alive. Eve Tuck (2019), for example, senses the spirit of her ancestors as she walks their cliffs. TallBear states ‘as an indigenous person, I am comfortable enfolding spirits or souls into descriptions of the beingness of nonhumans’ (p. 191). Consequently, she stresses the importance of ‘being receptive to or seeking knowledge about the nonhuman world brought to us by spirits—relations that science may never see or measure’ (p. 194). She specifically mentions dreams and rituals as structures indigenous peoples have to support this process, but it’s clear these cannot be appropriated by other cultures: There is a very real risk to Indigenous thinking being used by non-Indigenous scholars who apply it to Actor Network Theory, cosmopolitics, ontological and posthumanist threads without contending with the embodied expressions of stories, laws, and songs as bound with Indigenous-Place Thought. (Todd, 2016, p. 9) Harney and Moten (2013, p. 43) have no alternative strategies to propose, but conclude that ‘the uncanny feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the undercommons’, and this is multi-dimensional: The uncanny that one can sense in prophecy, the strangely known moment, the gathering content, of a cadence, and the uncanny that one can sense in co-operation, the secret once called solidarity. (p. 42) My research suggests the everyday world has signals coming from multiple directions some unseen, so exploring invisible education must thus be cognizant of this dimension. ‘There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 108). People living with dementia are sometimes already in touch with the unseen and working with them can help to sensitise researchers to these uncanny things. Finding a way to value, explore and work with this is an important challenge. Symbolic things

The making of objects, for example through crafts such as knitting, has surged in popularity and has been explored as a field of meaning making in the everyday (see Jones, 2022). Object making has also become a part of a posthuman methodology. An early example was the Creating our Place: Young People in Plymouth (Quinn, 2012). This brought together young people, academics, artists from theatre and visual arts, community organisations, and local authority and support services. Here the aim of the day was to explore what sort of city young people would like to envisage and live in. This was done through the making of objects and of an animated film

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and these arts activities were what really animated the day and made it worthwhile. Posthuman researchers have paid attention to craft and textiles as important forms of matter that help form the fabric of our lives, following the work of Haraway, itself using indigenous methodologies. They use activities in research such as string figuring in order to materialise ideas (see Taylor and Hughes, 2016). The significance of textile and weaving in the lives of indigenous women, as legitimate forms of knowledge production, also inspires posthuman thinkers. Material objects can exist as the embodiment of political ideas and engagement with them is also a part of invisible education, for example in activism. This is exemplified in my research project The Significance and Survival of Tent City University, funded by British Academy/Leverhulme, which was research with activists who had been involved in the Occupy movement in London. Inspired by the protests in Tahir Square, Egypt, Occupy Wall Street began in 2011, followed by other protest camps, including Occupy London. This was established by St Paul’s Cathedral on the edge of the financial district and included the informal learning space Tent City University (Figure 3) and the associated building the Bank of Ideas. I conducted a series of in-depth interviews over 2 years with six men and two women who had been involved in Occupy London, plus a range of other research activities. In particular I was interested in their engagement with Tent City University and how this related to their learning lives. The research will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, but at this point I want to focus on Tent City University as a material object. The research highlighted how materials exist as a substance and as an idea: they are onto-epistemological.

FIGURE 3 Tent

City University.

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FIGURE 4 Occupy

placard.

The tent of Tent City University, emblazoned with words, had a great symbolic and material significance, existing as a different kind of space deliberately designated for a different kind of learning. Once taken down, according to one participant it was hidden in a secret lockup and few people knew where. As part of their activist activity people fashioned communicative objects. Scraps of waste material such as cardboard were freighted with meaning (Figure 4). This is not new in the history of activism, for example at Greenham Common Women’s peace camp (a 1980’s protest led by women against the annexing of common land by US nuclear weapons), all available materials were used and living, protesting and crafting were intertwined in everyday life. The metaphor of the spider’s web was important suggesting relationality and connectivity with the more-than-human world. Some of the women wove giant woollen webs and enmeshed themselves in the fence around the military base, making arrests more difficult. I was only a visitor holding hands around the perimeter fence but knew other women who lived for weeks at the camp in the polythene tunnels called benders. The recent exhibition Radical Landscapes held in Tate Liverpool showed how Greenham Common is part of a wide range of encounters with landscape which both enact and produce everyday radical art: At Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp creativity was at the centre of communication and action. Protesters used potent banners, posters, sculpture, performance, songs, poetry and zines to convey their message … They together with other examples of frontline art, have inhabited an ambiguous place in the history of art. As a greater plurality of voices and media is welcomed into the canon, the role and importance of this creativity is starting to find recognition. (Dew, 2022, p. 78) In the language of my research participants creativity was a key element of their everyday living as Occupy activists. The modest and communal nature of this

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creativity was very important: ‘You felt you could do a small creative thing as part of something’. At the same time the activism brought together sense and thoughts: ‘I could smell something in the air that was very exciting’. Material or crafted objects were used as metaphors to summon up political ideas There was a piercing of the ideological canvas. JQ: What do you mean by that? Why do you use that particular image? If ideology is this sort of flattening canvas that limits what can and can’t be done, what can and can’t be said, it’s also something that kind of shuts the lights out, if you like … If what’s behind that ideological canvas is some kind of light then Occupy was a rupture … of the flatness and blandness … when the unsayable becomes sayable. (Noel, interview) As Barad (2007) suggests in her theory of intra-activity the human and the material are constantly being remade everyday with every move. Tent City University and the benders of Greenham are simply more visible enactments of the new learning worlds happening all the time. In the following chapter I will explore the kinds of invisible knowledges such activities engender. Conclusion

Invisible education emerges from intra-activity with the more-than-human world. Land, animals, machines and things of all kinds are integral to everyday learning and intra-activity with them constitutes new learning worlds. Recognising that this invisible education exists for those who have been failed by formal education, or positioned apart from it, repositions them as active learning subjects. This radically changes how education is understood and suggests new ways in which it can be explored. Whilst such invisible education does not float free from structures of inequality, it can provide valuable sources of resistance, pleasure and power. It can be more formative in shaping ongoing relations than any classroom. References Alaimo, S. (2010). States of suspension: transcorporeality at sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476–93. Alaimo, S. (2016). Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ayamba, M. A. (2022). We walked England before the English. In: Pih, D. and Bruni, L., eds. Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism. Liverpool: Tate, pp. 36–44. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2020). Influx and Efflux. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Bliss, E. (2020). Having and Being Had. London: Faber and Faber. Cutting, R. and Passy, R., eds. (2022). Contemporary Approaches to Outdoor Education: Animals, the Environment and New Methods. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, L. (2015). The End of the Story. London: Penguin Books. de Certeau (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. London: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dew, C. (2022). Hands on the land. In: Pih, D. and Bruni, L., eds. Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism. Liverpool: Tate, pp. 64–82. Ellmann, L. (2019). Ducks Newbury Port. Norwich: Galley Beggar Press. Ernaux, A. (2018). The Years. Edinburgh: Fitzcarraldo. Fowler, C. (2020). Green Unpleasant Land. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Franklin-Phipps, A. and Smithers, L. (2021). Queer Black adolescence, the impasse, and the pedagogy of cinema. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(7), 728–39. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1811677 Ging, D. and Siapera, E. (2019). Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gluck, L. (2006). Averno. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Hampton, L. (2011). In the Shadow of Things. London: Contrasto. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions. Higgins, M. and Madden, B. (2020). Refiguring presences in Kichwa-Lamista territories: natural-cultural (re)storying with indigenous place. In: Taylor, C. and Bayley, A. eds. Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 293–313. Jenkins, N., Gorman, R., Douglas, C., Ashall, V., Ritchie, L. and Jack-Waugh, A. (2021). Multi-species dementia studies: contours, contributions, and controversies. Journal of Aging Studies, 59, 8. Jones, S. (2015). Writer, sister, friend…. In: North End Writers (eds). Possibly Dorothy. Liverpool: Victoria Gallery and Museum. Jones, S. (2022). Knitting and everyday meaning making, TEXTILE. DOI: 10.1080/1 4759756.2022.2092967 Kinsky, E. (2020). Grove. Edinburgh: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. New York: The Crossing Press. MacKenzie, A. Rose. S. and Bhatt. I. (2021). The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era: Dupery by Design. London: Springer Nature. MacLure, M. (2019). Witches and wild women: bad girls of the anthropocene. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference, Toronto. Manning, E. (2023). Out of the Clear. Williamsburg: AK Press. Mansfield, K. (2017). Journal. London: Persephone Books. Mendick, H., Allen, K. and Harvey, L. (2015). We can get everything we want if we try hard’: young people, celebrity, hard work. British Journal of Educational Studies, 63(2), 161–78. DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2014.1002382 Merchant, S., Waite, S. and Quinn, J. (2013). Aspirations and Expectations of Young People Living in and Around Exmoor National Park. Exmoor: Exmoor National Park Authority. Motamedi-Fraser, M. (forthcoming). Dog Politics.

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Nelson, M. (2017). Bluets. London: Jonathan Cape. Nors, D. (2022). A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast. London: Pushkin Press. Olds, S. (2016). Odes. London: Cape. Ozeki, R. (2021). The Book of Form and Emptiness. Edinburgh: Canongate. Pederson, H. (2010). Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31, 225–37. Quinn, J. (2012). Creating Our Place: Young People in Plymouth. Economic and Social Research Council Festival of Social Science. Quinn, J. (2013a). New learning worlds: the significance of nature in the lives of marginalised young people. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(5), 716–30. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2013.728366 Quinn, J. (2013b). Theorising learning and nature: posthuman possibilities and problems. Gender and Education, 25(6), 738–54. Quinn, J. (2018). Respecting young people’s informal learning: Circumventing strategic policy evasions. Policy Futures in Education, 16(2), 144–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782​ 1031​7736​223 Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2014a). The Power of Songs. Available from: https//plymou​thmu​ sicz​one.org.uk Quinn J. and Blandon, C. (2014b). Feeling Their Way. Available from: https//plymou​thmu​ sicz​one.org.uk Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2017). The potential for lifelong learning in dementia: a post-humanist exploration. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 36(5), 578–94. DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2017.1345994. Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2020). Lifelong Learning and Dementia: A Posthumanist Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Quinn, J and Blandon, C. (2021). Book Launch Lifelong Learning and Dementia. Available from: Adventures in Posthumanism blog https://adve​ntur​esin​post​hum.wordpr​ess.com/ Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Batson, A. (2017). Beyond Words. Available from: https// plymou​thmu​sicz​one.org.uk Quinn, J., Lawy, R. and Diment, K. (2008). Young People in Jobs Without Training in South West England: Not Just ‘Dead-end Kids in Dead-end Jobs. Exeter: Marchmont Observatory, University of Exeter. Renold, E. (2019). Ruler-skirt risings: being crafty with how gender and sexuality researchactivisms can come to matter. In: Jones, T., Coll, I. and Taylor, C. A. eds. Uplifting Gender and Sexuality Study in Education and Research. London: Palgrave, pp. 1–26. Ringrose, J. and Renold, E. (2016). Cows, cabins, and tweets: posthuman intra-active affect and feminist fire in secondary school. In: Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C., eds. Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 220–42. Springay, S. (2022). Feltness. Durham: Duke University Press. Stepanova, M. (2017). In Memory of Memory. London: Fitzcarraldo Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. London: Duke University Press. TallBear, K. (2017). Beyond the life/not-life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking, and the new materialisms. In: Radin, J. and Kowal, E., eds. Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Boston, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 180–93. Taylor, C. A. (2021). The vital life of kitchens in higher education institutional workspaces: material matterings, affective choreographies and micropolitical practices. Journal of Posthumanism, 1(1), 33–52. DOI 10.33182/jp.v1i1.1378

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Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C., eds. (2016). Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Tett, L. and Hamilton, M., eds. (2021). Resisting Neoliberalism in Education. Bristol: Policy Press. Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1). DOI: 10.1111/ johs.12124 1- ZOE TODD Tuck, E. (2019). Examining our origins to uncover truth: indigeneity in education research. Symposium AERA Conference, Toronto. Veasna So, A. (2021). Afterparties. London: Grove Press. Waite, S., Waite, D., Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Goodenough, A. (2016). Mosaic Matters: External Evaluation of the Mosaic Project. London: Campaign for National Parks. Wordsworth, D. (2008). The Grassmere and Alfoxden Journals, Woolf, P., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 INVISIBLE KNOWLEDGES Activism, Volunteering and Work

This chapter argues that formal education does not generate new forms of power and knowledge, it replicates norms and is organised around the view of a human as a fixed subject that can be perfected by education. It is often the end point where radical lessons which have been learnt elsewhere are disseminated. This chapter discusses how invisible knowledges are created through activism, volunteering and work. It will draw on research with long-term activists about their learning lives. It will show how activism creates trails of invisible education throughout lives and how activism rather than being ephemeral continues to live on in multiple ways. It will also reflect on how women engage in invisible education in contexts of conflict. The chapter will also consider studies of volunteering as a form of invisible education and discuss how volunteering may produce either knowledge that reproduces hierarchies or deconstructive knowledge that challenges and unpicks inequalities. Finally, the chapter will consider how the world of work is changing and how knowledges created by marginalised young people in their daily lives are being used. It will ask whether invisible education is becoming a valuable resource that only those with resources can capitalise on. Learning how to work without being officially a worker is a pervasive trend in invisible education. Introduction

This chapter will consider how invisible education generates alternative forms of knowledge through activism, volunteering or work. Although the term lifelong learning has been co-opted by the neoliberal agenda, as being always ready to be retrained to serve the needs of capital, it can also mean always being open to the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-4

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possibilities of learning something new throughout life. Thus, such activities may be an important strand in the lifelong invisible education of participants: As a young woman developing a feminist consciousness there was no formal schooling in feminist theory, even though at the time I was also a student. I learnt from weekly discussion meetings, from demonstrations, from social life in pubs and clubs, from texts both fictional and non-fictional that seemed to be around, although there was never any directive to read them. Eventually this knowledge filtered through to formal educational contexts, but this invisible education was the grounding and the catalyst. In a more recent era the Metoo# movement surprised me with its successful infiltration of popular culture, even though the breakthrough debates on violence against women, rape and patriarchy had been well-rehearsed long ago. Young people are learning to define and understand domestic abuse or sexual harassment through personal testimonies shared on social media, through music, TV, film and not in the classroom. Seeing sexual harassment or violence against women becoming newsworthy and feminism as trendy is profoundly disconcerting to those like myself with a history of marginalised activism in those fields. It provokes the question what is the relation between our activism of the past and its current manifestations: what is the aftermath of activism and how does activism function as invisible education? ( JQ diary) Invisible education through activism

There appears to be a surge of public activism, as well as concerted efforts by governments across the world to reduce the right to protest. It is happening on the streets in Extinction Rebellion, women’s marches and Black Lives Matter (BLM); on social media in the Metoo# and TimesUp# campaigns, in universities with strikes and accompanying teach-outs and in myriad local campaigns. All these protests have an educational element, whether explicit or implicit, and bodies and emotions are on the line in the hope that society will learn to change. The BLM movement, for example, has helped to direct understanding to the dailiness of violence and its normalisation as part of a fundamental culture of anti-blackness. It has performed shifts not just in what people say or think but in what they do; whether it be premier league footballers taking the knee or young people pulling statues down. Activism is not necessarily a possession of the left, indeed it could be argued that the right has recently dominated public spaces of protest. If activism is a coming together publicly to protest and campaign against injustice; its legitimacy depends on how valid the claims of injustice are. Today it may take place on social media without ever setting foot on a pavement. This can be heroic in contexts of extreme repression such as the women’s protests in Iran following

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the murder of Jin Jiyan Azadi, or dangerously deluded, as in the protests of incels (see Ging and Siapera, 2019). Being an activist can also be seen as a form of peer learning, learning from one another how to analyse, understand and resist. The Metoo# movement might be seen as social media peer learning, each story of rape and harassment adding to a communal ‘fund of knowledge’. However, peer learning as in the sharing of misinformation with peers can be very problematic. In the incel ‘movement’ misogynists share their hatred of women and justify this through narratives of feminist domination and rejection. Ging and Siapera (2019) show how this feeds inadequacy whilst offering tales of ‘heroic’ incel fightback that culminate in real life violence and murder of women. Educational spaces have often been shaped by activism, as in women’s studies, critical race studies, disability studies and queer studies. Many academics have always explicitly positioned their work as having political ends in mind. Currently there is a focus on the strategic role and effective tactics of ‘academic activists’, for example suggesting taking lessons in impact from feminist eco-activist groups (see Weatherall, 2023). In adult education community activism is placed in a central position (see Clancy, Harman and Jones, 2022). Research on what has been conceptualised as ‘social movement learning’ is well-established (see Hall, Clover, Crowther and Scandrett, 2012). Fitzsimons (2022), for example, considers the history of reproductive rights campaigning in Ireland as a form of adult education. However, research which specifically explores relationships between activism and invisible education across lives from a posthuman perspective is hard to find. The afterlife of Occupy

I am using posthumanism to consider the afterlife of activism and how activism constitutes part of ongoing lifelong invisible education. The Significance and Survival of Tent City University project was interested to see whether Occupy Tent City university still lived on in the form of what I have called ‘imagined social capital’ (Quinn, 2010). Here benefits accrue from symbolic and imagined networks, including with those we do not know or fictional and imagined characters; or in this case from networks that no longer exist. Using longitudinal research, the study considered the part that Occupy London has played over time. Occupy has been explored by others as an example of radical pedagogy (see Earle, 2014). My work has another purpose in exploring the ways such activism creates and draws on epistemological, symbolic and material ‘trails’ or waves across life, which constitute invisible education. Rather than unique ‘lines of flight’, they are both pathways that might be followed by others and vapours that disappear in an instant. Originally conceptualised as life history research in the qualitative tradition, the research became postqualitative in its move from the focus on an individualised human subject, as I shall discuss. Occupy has been critiqued by many as having no fixed objectives and not having transformed society; in the words of one of my research

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participants: ‘Occupy wasn’t Jesus’. It generated many brilliant ideas which were left undeveloped, which was to another participant ‘rather tragic’. However, it served an effective ideological purpose to highlight the inequality between the 1% who control global resources and the majority who do not. The international Occupy movement has attracted much sociological debate about issues such as leadership and public space (see, e.g. Gamson and Sifry, 2015; Schmidt and Babits, 2014). Attention has been paid to the use of social media networks in such movements and how far they have really been central (Lovink, 2016). Others have emphasised the role Occupy has played in generating more organised movements for rights and equality (see Jaffe, 2016). Those particularly interested in education have placed Occupy within the sphere of what has been termed ‘social movement learning’ (see Hall et al., 2012). Some have undertaken action research with Occupy with the explicit aim of generating and spreading critical pedagogy (see Earle, 2014; Hall, 2012; Neary and Amsler, 2012). Tent City University has been seen as part of the tradition of alternative universities and radical adult education, and as demonstrating the continuing power of democratic forms of education. In actively engaging and reflecting back to participants such researchers often aimed to help them to develop and improve their pedagogical practice. Whilst this is admirable in its intent, I would be uncomfortable advocating such an action research model. I do not see Occupy as something that needs to be improved or myself as an improver. Here I rather take a posthuman approach with a retrospective perspective on the aftermath of activism and in focusing on activism’s relationship with lifelong learning. A posthuman approach to activism

I conducted a series of long in-depth interviews over 2 years with six men and two women who had been involved in Occupy London. Three of the men and the two women were interviewed twice. They were aged from early 20s to late 70s, all white from both working-class and middle-class backgrounds. All but two were originally from the UK, but there was a lot of international mobility within the sample. There was no aim to gain a representative sample, but the sample was purposive in enabling age diversity to be explored and was somewhat typical of the white male domination of Occupy. Interviews were taped and transcribed. The project also explored their ongoing activities via attending physical meetings, tracking websites and blogs, studying campaigning activities internationally and nationally and reading academic publications, curricula, reports and policy documents provided by the participants. All participants were given pseudonyms and assured anonymity for ethical reasons, but most would have been very happy to have their own names used, both because they were proud of their actions and because they assumed they were already on the files of the police or CIA. The project generated a broad range of data acts: full transcripts of 20 hours of interviews, email exchanges, field notes from meetings, analysis of websites and

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blogs and of curricula documents, academic articles and papers. The multiplicity and diversity of the data helped to perform a shift from the anticipated life-history research model to one where networks, flows and distributions were much more important: JQ: Do you see yourself as part of a web of people that are trying to do things? Oh totally, totally. I mean a lot of that web is completely disorganized and doesn’t know itself or its members. (Noel, interview 1) It was no longer possible or desirable to take an individualistic approach. Indeed, I came to see certain forms of life history as neoliberal and inimical to the spirit of Occupy, which at a basic level was about the commonality of the 99% in only having 1% of the world’s wealth. So, I charted the waves and flows and weaves generated by Occupy, their movements forwards and backwards. Rather than taking a humanistic approach which focuses on the individual and their personal bounded experience, the research identifies a number of different, winding ‘trails’. These trails were not fixed, were affective and symbolic as well as physical, and every participant might pass along them at different moments. Each trail was associated with different ways of thinking about learning and knowledge. The concept of trail here differs somewhat from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’. As Brian Massumi (1987) argues in his Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, line of flight is not about fleeing or flying but about flowing and acting against dominant forms: ‘Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 27). In this sense it is about a disposition and each line of flight can never be replicated by another. Trails however are pathways others might follow exhibiting ‘the concrete historical and geographical details of everyday lives’ (Smith, 1987, p. 1), but are also vapours: elusive, transitory and symbolic. I also draw on the metaphor of the wave which does some powerful work. According to one Occupy participant her opportunities for activism keep coming in waves and she responds. I’ve seen a lot of waves of life … I see that people do resist at a certain point. I mean sometimes you wonder why they don’t resist sooner, but and I don’t want to be Pollyanna, I think the world is in absolutely dreadful shape but on the other hand you can’t just say it’s in dreadful shape and then just not do anything … the dreadfulness will just carry on … And I suppose I’ve seen that things don’t go in a straight line. (Anna, interview 1) Talk of first, second or third wave feminism is common, but tends to be used to fix women in place. (When positioned by another researcher as a ‘second wave

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feminist’ I responded that I hoped I was still riding the wave.) In posthuman writing, seas and wave abound (see Alaimo, 2010; Neimanis, 2017) both because of their materiality as actors in the world, and their capacity to evoke the fluidity and flow of existence; including that of humans. In tracing my own use of poetry in research I found a line of waves and sea: from Sylvia Plath’s Medusa to Elizabeth Bishops At the Fishhouses to D.H. Lawrence’s The Mana of the Sea (Quinn, 2016b). Poetry collapsed supposed boundaries between material (outside) and thought (inside) in ways that are especially useful for posthumanism. Thinking with water and waves especially in global contexts, and with a postcolonial eye on the colonisation of water as a resource, also raises the kinds of knowledge questions Occupy activists were concerned with: The relationship between knowledge and water, … is not that simple. Understanding this relationship seems also to be a question of distinguishing between kinds of knowledge—knowledge that commoditizes and colonizes, knowledge that generates necessary anger and action, knowledge that heals. Knowledge that builds communities or knowledge that fractures them. Knowledge that responds or knowledge that masters. (Neimanis, 2017, p. 57) What kinds of knowledge did Occupy create? The chapter will draw out and discuss different waves and trails generated by Occupy and Tent City University as they emerged in my study. Formalised activist classrooms: ‘throwing bricks’

Although Occupy itself was chaotic and multiplicitous, it seemed that it had created one trail that was straight and narrow. Occupy had a catalytic effect which prompted some participants to organise ongoing weekly meetings, discussion fora and expositions of economic and social theories: We’ve built this sort of model of the economy, and we think we can interpret any problem in the world. It’s radical activism throwing bricks at people’s worldview. (Colin, interview 1) In turn this influenced and engaged a wider audience via constant blogs and emails. The tone was libertarian, and I finally withdrew from the email list when messages became virulently anti-vaxxing. This sense of a capacious alternative world-view, albeit with a small number of adherents, was quite masculinised: not a wave but a ‘brick’. Here Colin took on the role of pedagogue/seer. Although this was not formal education, my observation of meetings suggested that

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it proceeded in quite a top-down and didactic way: a teacher had the ‘what works’ model which could solve any problem and others learnt how to apply it: what Neimanis calls ‘knowledge that masters’. Other participants in my study encountered these classrooms and some found them inspirational and some uncongenial. It was an interesting corrective to idealised visions of invisible education to note that it might set up its own formal classrooms, even if they took place above a pub. Activism as a way of life/lifelong learning as everyday practice: ‘part of my history’

This was a trail most participants seemed to follow, at least some of the time. In this trail Occupy was simply part of a lifetime’s engagement with activism and protest and an example of bringing that knowledge and sharing it. It is ‘community building knowledge’ in Neimanis’s terms. Activism is embodied in daily choices and personal relationships, which in turn influence future actions. It’s part of my history and what I learnt as a child to have a social conscience and it’s also my reality … what I learnt was that these movements connect to each other through human beings not abstractly … even though I kind of joke that I am ‘Anna revolutionary (failed)’ but you know we learn a lot from failure, so I see myself as one of those connecting points across the generations … I think things are still popping up, so I’ll pop along with them. (Anna, interview 1) The repeated use of ‘learning’ here suggests that activism is inherently a knowledge project. It is a knowledge born of failure and repetition with its own (failed) degree classification but is also indefatigable. The comic image of everyday ‘popping up’ (like a whack-a-mole endlessly waiting to be hit and to bounce back) contrasts with the heavy brick wielded in the first trail. In terms of gender there are some competing and converging narratives happening for Anna. One is that her most profound learning experience was to be a child brought up to have a social conscience ‘made to think’ of herself as an actor for good in the world, but her narrative of service, which women still internalise, was not to the nuclear family but to others, the wider family of society. Activism also taught her to speak out, to demand that she be heard, including in protest meetings dominated by men. She had learnt how to make meetings inclusive and dialogical, and she insisted that this replace male pontifications. Being one of a multitude of ‘connecting points’ across generations seems to speak to a way of thinking and being that are not individualistic but networked and relational. For Anna, her invisible education of activism fed into her work in formal education where she tried to transmit the lessons she had learned through action. ‘We learn a lot from failure’ is not a mantra

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suitable for formal education, where the emphasis is on achieving and performing success, but essential in activism where many protests do not immediately produce the desired result. It is a language of persistence adapted because the only other option would be to stop living and being altogether. The knowledge engendered in activism is about time as a spiral and history as waves, is counter-memory of how history can be understood. In counter-memory Occupy was not a failure that ended totally. Tent City University did not die when it came down. Rather the ideas carried on in the bodies of activists. We could argue that activism is both material and immaterial. As previously suggested it is a bodily affair, but it also existed in a realm that could not be quantified of hope, commitment and connection. Sometimes this everyday learning solidified and branched off into taking many classes in community contexts or teaching alternative courses, being an educator as well as a learner: I always was taking these open-access courses cheap or free following my own nose … You never know what the meeting of one other person is going to lead to, you know, it’s a magic thing and who is going to connect. (Anna, interview 1) These trails have peaks and dips, places and scenes where activism seemed to make a difference such as San Francisco in the 1970s, followed by more barren periods: But you know that moment ended. JQ: Why do you think the moment ended? Oh, just history. Things will come around again in a different form. (Anna, interview 2) Being always active and always involved in protest, the older participants in my study stayed connected to the world to younger people and to their own histories. After Occupy, Anna continued to act up and out protesting disability rights, active in local housing campaigns following up all the anti-poverty offshoots and connections from Occupy. She is responding to learning affects generated by everyday problems and a sense of being uncomfortable. What does it feel like when your disabled sister cannot get benefits, or your son afford a home in London? These are the everyday questions that provoke her learning and activism and bind them together. Intergenerational ties also shape this trail for younger people. Noel’s love of his working-class family and desire to see them recognised and respected were learning affects for him, indivisible from his academic analysis. Activism was an alternative and potent source of learning, forming how they understood themselves as constituted in relation to the world. This immersion in

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the world in messy, cold, tiring, dangerous material conditions was not a mere backdrop to activism it was an intrinsic part of living an activist life. Academic activism/intellectual engagement: ‘never looked back’

Many academics took part in Occupy and several of those interviewed were involved in academia at different levels either as early career or very late. In this trail, Occupy was a key part of academic life: shaping decisions made regarding academic research and areas of study: ‘the politicization I experienced around the Tent City University has translated into the rest of my academic career’. This in turn links to campaigning and attempts to influence policy in more mainstream contexts. Here being involved in Occupy acts as a kind of seed bed and the visible/ invisible education are two sides of the same coin. And now I’m an academic at a European university and my political activism is still educational in a certain sense. … I do, I guess what would be called ‘organic’ intellectual stuff. I’ve set up a sort of open democracy, I’ve set up a section with a number of other academics, trying to put, essentially, what we do into the public domain and generate scholarly public dialogues. (Noel, interview 2) Academics always face a struggle in intervening in ‘the public domain’, but Occupy was already squarely there, very much under the feet of Londoners as they crossed the city. Its message about the 1% was a blunt one, but it carried that message internationally. In a sense post Occupy academics who had been involved were left trying to recapture the clarity of that ‘public dialogue’. They wanted to practice what Neimanis calls ‘knowledge that responds’, so that a critical dialogue could continue to challenge and influence policy. The dialogue is ‘scholarly’, so being involved in invisible education through activism has not discredited academic work, rather helped to build it. JQ: I’m just very interested to see the way your work is permeating in lots of different sectors and places and spaces. If you look back over the few years to Tent City from this position now, what do you think are the connections between now and then? In terms of my life? JQ: Yeah, your life and your work and where it’s going. Yeah, it’s pretty direct. I never looked back from that point JQ: You never looked back? I never looked back you know as in like it was a watershed moment for me. (Noel, interview 2)

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Activism as a philosophical practice: ‘towards a wiser world’

Occupy also acted as a philosophical provocation. One trail it enacted was the expression of ethical thinking. For some this had developed over a long lifetime. This included much concern about the nature of knowing and learning. I’d been arguing for decades that we need to transform universities so that they become rationally devoted to seeking and promoting wisdom, not just acquiring knowledge—wisdom being the capacity to see what’s of value to solve problems … and help us progress towards a wiser world. (Max, interview 1) Tent City University was a moment in an ongoing debate on of how universities should develop as public institutions and offered an opportunity for ‘intellectual life’. In contrast to the deadening weight of the contemporary university, ‘people engaged in serious issues in a kind of lively and imaginative and passionate way’. This passion was driven by visions of what the world should and could be like: If universities are on behalf of humanity and having as their fundamental purpose to help humanity towards as good a world as possible then they need to be activists. That’s sort of basic, I mean rational activists, committed … and that’s why one needs to be open about what is of value, what kind of society, what kind of world should we be trying to make progress towards. (Max, interview 2) The discourse here is one of ‘value’ of ‘progress ‘towards the right kind of world’. Activism such as Occupy helps because it helps build shared values and is a fora for working them out. Its very existence posits the central question: what kind of world so we want to live in? Potentially it generates ‘knowledge that heals’. Max explicitly connected Occupy and the opportunities for learning there to what children experience in their everyday activities before they begin their formal education. The images he uses evoke invisible education, although he would not use the term. His suggestion of learning from animals also suggests that this ethical trail is posthuman in its orientation as it faces the world not just the humans within it. Children have this massive curiosity which gets kind of squashed when they go to school, you know ‘shut up, we know, listen to us’. Children achieve, do these amazing things … if you think what a three year old has done, you know they’ve somehow picked up a whole view of the universe, a sense of life, other people, themselves, they’ve learnt to speak and understand … and this isn’t done by formal education it’s just sort of you know rubs off … But I think we should learn from that and I think we should also learn from the way animals learn, you know through play.

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For all the participants, Occupy forms part of an ongoing search for meaning in life and for making their own lives meaningful. The search for meaning seems to supersede the notion of responsibility, they are part of the churn of life not separate from it. JQ: Do you feel you have a responsibility? I try and work hard working out what I really understand by that term. I honestly don’t know. I live as if I do but I can see quite how damaging living with this responsibility to save the world can be for anyone that thinks that way, so I don’t know about responsibility. I have certain capabilities that allow me to do certain things and I think they are potentially useful they certainly allow me to derive some kind of meaning, and a large part of it is also enjoyable probably because it’s what gives me meaning. (Noel, interview 2) Disillusioned retreat from activism/painful lessons: ‘naïve ignorance’

The aftermath of activism is not necessarily a happy one. The final trail the research uncovered leads away from activism altogether and from an engagement in the potential of invisible learning. Here Occupy has taught negative lessons: one is that activism is beside the point in a world where nothing changes for the better and activist movements can be readily unravelled: I can’t say I left the experience of Occupy particularly happily. I realise there was a relentless campaign to destroy, disrupt and discredit the people involved in Occupy, but given the depth and the profundity of the crisis, I was very depressed that the networks and communities generated by the Occupy universities were so easily dispersed. (Harry, email) At the extreme there was a sense that activism itself is corrupt: it is ‘knowledge that fractures’. Commitment to Occupy is matched by some despair when the values it espouses seem to have been betrayed. This prompts retreat and alienation, including alienation from education. Kim had been full of enthusiasm and dedication to Occupy when we first met. She contrasted Tent City University’s opportunity for educational intervention with negative experiences of traditional universities and had thrown herself into it without hesitation. Our final exchange showed her deliberately turning her back on everything that had so inspired and enthused her, including withdrawing from any activism or education at all: I learned that the revolution is not what it says on the tin, even for those who felt they produced it. It is impossible not to be complicit. Those years were me living in naive ignorance.

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I seek a peaceful life and take pleasure from long walks in nature. I once believed anything was possible. This might still be true, but is a longer game than I neither have the resources for, nor imagined. I’m sorry. (Kim, email) The ‘long game’ of activism, the knowledge that the next wave may take so long to come becomes simply too much to bear. Activism, like any love affair, requires emotional investment, but that investment is what will make you vulnerable. Living on

The research fills a gap in our understanding of the afterlife of activism and the role activism plays in invisible education. By taking a posthuman, rather than a critical realist, approach it provides new perspectives on activism and learning. It generates a new way of understanding activism and learning as enmeshed together in diverse trails. It does not argue, as Earle (2014), for example, has done, that Occupy disappeared because of the lack of a dedicated critical pedagogue. The findings suggest that the relationship between activism and learning is more diffuse and complex. Although the associated trails are not always fruitful ones, in multiple ways Occupy does live on and continues to be an agent in the world. It is commonly assumed that when activism is over, associated learning stops and fades. One of the questions the research addressed was whether Tent City University still survived as a form of imagined social capital. The research shows the way that Occupy is being mobilised not only as imagined social capital but as other forms of capital too. It demonstrates the ways that activism provokes and protects ongoing learning; whilst learning holds up and inspires activism. Maybe we can say the methods and the one percent all these things have permeated through individual activists into other expressions and that’s real and that’s important whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t need to be branded Occupy but people learn things and will take them and are taking them forward into other areas. People say oh well Occupy just disappeared and it never meant anything. Well, no they’re really wrong. Nuit debout is clearly related to Occupy, Occupy was connected to the indignados—things aren’t just separate. The Occupy I was involved with here wasn’t just its own thing that had no relation … so I do feel the global connections definitely. (Noel, interview 2) I don’t think Occupy died, it’s compost. Political compost. People got something out of it and taken it forward in some way, but we don’t know those ways because it’s all a bit underground. (Anna, interview 2)

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Occupy continued to work in invisible ways, providing fertile soil and lessons for other movements internationally. These global links are interesting in terms of invisible education. Ingold (2015, pp. 89–90) argues that knowledge is integrated not ‘from point to point across the world’; rather it ‘builds up, from an array of points and the materials collected from them, into an integrated assembly’. Social media facilitates such networking, but there have always been global movements, which suggests that the affective, the atmospheric plays its part in spreading movement for change. It is the shared learning affect of everyday problems of climate change that is propelling many into activism today. It is those indigenous activists such as the Guardiões da Floresta in Brazil who are the most inspiring, the most impacted by colonial practices of devastation and the most vulnerable to violence. Activism is a deadly game in most countries of the world, and invisible education is gained at a harsh price. Pedagogies of pain: art and activism in zones of conflict

how something unknown can emerge from what we thought we knew, how one thing can be swallowed up by another, very different thing—how it can be inverted, transformed into something monstrous, no longer controllable—or sometimes into beauty, new life, new form. (Erpenbeck, 2020, Not a Novel, p. 150) Thinking about global movements and how they are linked to invisible education, there is a great deal to say: the following is a small contribution. I conducted research in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) from 2014 to 2016, funded by the Council of Europe. This research was an in-depth study of widening participation and inclusion in their system of higher education. I have also conducted a small study in Beirut in 2018 which explored initiatives to provide informal learning for marginalised children. Critical posthumanism helps conceptualise power in different ways, as communal and relational and knowledge as shared and productive rather than the possession of a privileged group. Sometimes this knowledge is the product of suffering and conflict. Having conducted this research in BiH and in Beirut I became aware of how this knowledge permeates in unofficial and hidden ways outside of the formal educational sphere. Neither of these studies were of invisible education as such, but through them I gained glimpses of how women use invisible education to survive at times and in spaces of conflict. BiH still struggles to survive the war which happened in the 1990s but left the country structurally and culturally divided. There was deep concern about the levels of formal education available, which our study demonstrated in detail. Despite the legacies of shame and horror that still exist from the rape camps of the war, and the fact that many women who have experienced this cannot speak about it, women in BiH have campaigned together for international recognition of rape as a weapon of war. It was in BiH that Women for Women International was

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FIGURE 5 Women

for Women International.

formed, which specifically focuses on women abused through war (Figure 5). It is they who have brought this narrative into global consciousness. This photo from Women for Women International highlights the Bosnian tradition of weaving and uses it as an expression of resistance. Posthuman thinkers draw attention to the importance of craft and challenge a humanist hierarchy where fine arts are at the top, as practiced by white male individuals and communal crafts practiced by women at the bottom. Braidotti talks about ‘how to have a dynamic vision of pain’ (as cited by Strom, 2018, p. 4). Invisible education can be a pedagogy of pain with its own powerful materials. In Beirut an already chaotic and unstable society was thrown into further collapse by the massive explosion in the port in 2020. My research had been conducted in a context where formal education was fragmented with very little collaboration across public bodies and confusion about qualifications and training, plus huge numbers of refugees and children and families living in extreme poverty. Even those with only a slight knowledge of the country, such as myself, could see that the explosion was the culmination of decades of corruption. At the same time no-one visiting Beirut could fail to notice the vibrancy of public art, graffiti and the music scene. Women are keeping the sphere of everyday art alive, for example, through the Beirut Artists Residency. Everyday creativity in graffiti still blooms. The intra-activity of Beiruti and graffiti cuts through the torpor of the corrupt state and produces a new world and a new being (Figure 6). The conditions of possibility are learnt out on the street, even when everything seems to conspire against them. Even though an outsider like myself cannot read it properly, this image seems a sign and an expression of hope; acknowledging that the wall itself is ephemeral, but while it stands it can express potentia. Even before the explosion, walls were marked with bullet holes and both Sarajevo and Beirut are balanced on a knife edge. One could argue that for BiH and Beirut the fact that invisible education

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FIGURE 6 Beirut

graffiti.

still happens, that new worlds are generated in everyday living is immaterial in the face of so much disaster. Yet these green shoots of hope are still precious. It allows women to persist as agents and indeed as teachers (Figure 7). Thinking about the global war on women, how to show solidarity and how to learn and what with. The most potent image of this year is the flag made from long black hair, cut as protest by women in Iran after the murder of Jin Jiyan Azadi. The danger is that it becomes a fetishistic object for the West. We have our own morality police on social media, out to shame girls and women even to suicide. We have incels, we have policemen who rape and kill women walking home at night. How to acknowledge the extreme danger that women face in Iran or Afghanistan without suggesting that women in the West are free, or that Western society is civilized and blameless? It was very moving to listen to the Kurdish academic Farangis Ghaderi last night, at the meeting in remembrance of Jin Jivan Avadi, explaining how the protests in Iran were not a flashpoint of rage, but built on years of resistance and everyday cultural activity by Kurdish women: invisible education in motion. Visiting the Above us the Milky Way exhibition in Derry this summer at the Void modern art gallery I saw how Afghani women resisted and protested gender discrimination and injustice through their powerful works of art and inserted them into the everyday.

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FIGURE 7 ‘Armor’

2015 Kubra Khademi photograph.

Walking silently in her armored breastplate, through the streets of Kabul, surrounded by jeering men, performance artist Kubra Khademi sent a global signal that must not be ignored. This is the visceral visual aspect of activism, taking everyday violence, condensing it and making it visible. ( JQ, diary) Invisible education through volunteering

Volunteering is another sphere where invisible knowledge is generated, and learning happens. Activism and volunteering have common aspects, as volunteering may connect with social justice goals. Culturally shaped, where and how people volunteer responds to the philosophical questions of values and visions as well as to material demands. Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov (2022) explains that in Ukrainian, ‘toloka’, community work for the common good, is a strong tradition.

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Volunteering, as in helping those you do not know, was less established, but was now an essential part of Ukraine’s survival during the war with Russia, including offering internally displaced people new forms of learning. As he muses, both sardonically and sincerely: Can war be a time for self-improvement, for self-education? Of course it can. At any age and in any situation, even in wartime. You can discover new aspects of life, new knowledge and new opportunities. You can learn to bake Easter bread in a damaged stove. You can get a tattoo for the first time of your life at the age of 80. You can start learning Hungarian or Polish. You can even start learning Ukrainian if you didn’t know it before. (2022, p. 4) He shows that volunteering is indeed a political act. However, volunteering has tended to be depoliticised and seen as both a virtuous activity and one which can accrue certain benefits such as employability or social networks. Students for example are exhorted to volunteer to enhance their CVs and bolster the impact narrative of their universities, older people are encouraged to volunteer to enhance their own wellbeing as productive citizens. In Holdsworth and Quinn (2012), we turned a critical eye on community engagement and volunteering amongst students. We charted how it can be reproductive of existing power relations, reaffirming ideas that inequalities were ‘natural’ and that the volunteer had a neutral yet bountiful role to play within them. To achieve what we termed ‘deconstructive volunteering’ the experience needed to dislodge existing assumptions and contribute to a critical understanding of systems of inequality. Our conclusions were that in and of itself volunteering would not produce this deconstructive mode. For students it needed to be combined with access to knowledge and critique that the university should provide. For volunteers who are not students this critique could also be provided by other sources of knowledge, such as radical movements like Occupy or volunteer agencies themselves. Thus, volunteering can become a fertile source of invisible education. Thinking about volunteering I wondered why as an undergraduate student I had spent so much time volunteering and what I had gained from it. Counting the volunteering activities of my undergraduate life I realized that this had superseded many formal educational ones. Instead of morning lectures I had gone to the home of a Ugandan Asian refugee, eaten her spicy food and defended her against her husband when he claimed she couldn’t possibly learn English. I had run a creche in a prison for visiting families. Instead of reading journal articles I had worked many weeks and weekends in a playgroup for inner city children, always passed over for leadership roles by men. This had been an education in many ways but also one whose full opportunities had

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passed me by. What had I learned about Ugandan politics, the prison system or poverty after all? Was it a form of ‘re-education’ or even punishment, after all my lectures on novels or poetry were more self-indulgent and purely pleasurable than volunteering was. It was certainly part of a liberal project of virtue, an enlightenment notion of the responsible citizen that would have borne little scrutiny and was certainly ‘reproductive’. In comparison with being a feminist activist at a later date, where texts and resources were shared and discussed, being an undergraduate volunteer did not radically shift assumptions or introduce new ideas. All these volunteering opportunities were provided without any contextual knowledge or support: they were constituted as sufficient in and of themselves. Nevertheless, I value this time and its everyday affects and subtle influences and wish I had been given the tools to make more of it. ( JQ diary) My research on volunteering also connects with the work on nature and matter that I discussed in the previous chapter. In further volunteering research with students conducted later and in a different context (see Quinn, 2016), I was interested to note how volunteering and the sea became intertwined. It became a small example of how volunteering may permeate everyday lives in unexpected ways and thus become a part of invisible education. This project began with 8 focus groups involving a total of 80 students from across disciplines and stages. The research then identified issues of particular interest and ran thematic groups with local, international, rural and mature students. This was followed by interviews and 18 biographical accounts of active student volunteers and interviews with the community partners linked to those activities. Much like the research with low-waged young people, I had not expected nature to take such a prominent role. Much of this was down to the place, the ‘ocean city’ of Plymouth where a beautiful location meets areas of deprivation. Instead of talking about connecting with local people, volunteers had their eyes on the sea, which came up repeatedly in their accounts of living and volunteering in the Plymouth area. They (non-local students) love it here in the sense that they love the beaches and the outdoors and they love the coast … But they never really talk about the people as such. (Local student) Alongside their formal studies, students were learning how to live by the sea in their everyday lives. In their volunteering the students came closer to the sea, learned to show care for it, for example, through beach cleaning. In this sense this was a form of invisible education. However, this seemed far from deconstructive

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in that they saw themselves as the good, educated citizens here to teach recalcitrant locals: Our volunteering is focused on community engagement. The natural environment that you are looking at, getting them to see what’s actually there and close to them. (Simon, interview) The idea of ‘getting them to see what’s actually there’, as if what the local people saw was ‘unreal’ and flawed is a telling one. It reminded me of some adult educators I have heard at conferences wanting to teach the public ‘the right way’ to read a museum or art gallery. Perhaps what local people saw was the poverty around them and this eclipsed the sea. In the Power of Songs research with older people living in care homes, discussed in Chapter 3, we found that local people had a rich heritage and knowledge of the city. This resource did not seem to attract the students who were interviewed, who sometimes preferred a young bubble. Everything’s here I very rarely go into town if I don’t have to because I hate all the people … Quite weird people sometimes! and it’s nice to walk about (on campus) and see only young people and I feel kind of like this is my city. (Tom, interview) Posthuman approaches ‘highlight what is typically cast in the shadow: the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things’ (Bennett, 2010, p. ix). In this case they make strange the stories of engagement with the sea, interrogating the focus on the sea and not on the humans that surround them. The sea operated to deconstruct and destabilise ways of seeing, thinking and being, so that the more than human superseded the human. ‘I think you get a different outlook on a lot of things if you’re on a coastal area.’ The sea is dangerous, it is other, it literally takes you out of your depth. Alaimo (2010, p. 22) says ‘sea life hovers at the very limit of what humans can comprehend’, and Neimanis (2017) stresses its ‘unknowability’ so why did students seem to have such an affinity with it? Alaimo (2010, p. 283) posits the concept of trans-corporeality where there is in effect no division between the human and the sea: ‘we dwell within and as part of a dynamic intra-active, emergent material world’. Bennett’s (2020) idea of the waves and influx and efflux that shape the porous I gestures to the sea in material and symbolic ways. The sea is part of all of us and these connections are unspoken. So when D.H. Lawrence (2001) in the poem The Mana of the Sea claims ‘I am the sea, I am the sea’ as the culmination of an extended metaphor of sea/body: tracing ‘the tide in my arms’, ‘the flat recurrent breakers of my two feet’ he enacts the fact that ‘the environment is not located somewhere out there but is always the very substance of ourselves’ (Alaimo, 2010, p. 4). By responding so strongly to the pull of the sea, students are engaged in an invisible education about their relationality in

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the world. Volunteering gives them opportunities to materialise this relationality, to come closer, to enter into new worlds. This may be more fundamental than what they learn in university seminars and lectures; even though it may not be conscious or verbalised. They legitimise the strong pull that they feel towards the sea within a humanist discourse of active citizenship, but their invisible education is potentially posthuman. So, volunteering has unintended ineffable consequences and can be part of an important learning journey. Devalued knowledges: marginalised young people and work

In this final section, I will consider the hidden knowledges of young people in low-status and low-waged jobs, drawing on research with young people in what was then called ‘jobs without training’ (Quinn, Lawy and Diment, 2008). As previously discussed in Chapter 3, this research involved longitudinal research with young people in southwest England who were working in shops, hotels, cafes, building sites and other jobs which were low paid and given very low status, even though they are frontline jobs that keep society going. They called themselves ‘the thick bunch’ and were those who had done very badly at school and left with few qualifications at 16. In posthuman terms the young people find their being in the now and not what might happen, they have an untethered sense of time: ‘I just want to float’. School takes on a dreamlike quality, where they can barely remember what happened or what they studied. They also position themselves as somehow outside the category human: ‘I’m rubbish’, having failed in the educational project that defines a successful human. Many things have changed since this research, the pandemic erased many such jobs, sometimes permanently, and there has been a shift to care work as marginally better paid. Brexit has made the work context even more parochial and created ruptures and conflict. Conditions have become even more precarious with zero hours contracts becoming the norm. The category of ‘jobs without training’ to which our research responded has been removed now that all young people must continue into some form of education or training until the age of 18: but ‘crap jobs’ still await those who do not succeed in formal education. What has not changed are the negative attitudes that surround such young people. One of the most pervasive is that they hate learning, and this is especially reiterated when it comes to white working class men. The one thing that policy-makers refuse to do is admit that they are already learning; albeit in different ways and contexts outside of school or college (see Quinn, 2018). The education system does not love them, they are not socially mobile, but they still love everyday learning. Some academics find calling this: ‘unrequited love’, excessive and even embarrassing, and policymakers prefer to look the other way. I count my engagement with this research as a formative moment in thinking about education, and these young people taught me valuable lessons about invisible education. Through them I learnt that hidden from the sight of policy-makers young working class people are developing and

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demonstrating multiple forms of learning: whether it be digitally, learning how to DJ, in engineering, restoring cars, working with animals or even performing as a magician. The point is the surprise, the pleasure and the invisibility. The increase in engagement with social media since the original research has been exponential and may mean that, more than ten years on, some can translate their learning pleasures into wages, or display them on Instagram; meaning that invisibility depends on whose eyes are looking. The terms of measurement about skill and qualification have radically changed in many contexts: yet as far as the dominant educational discourse is concerned, invisible working-class education does not exist. In terms of future mutabilities, invisible education that is oriented to culture or technology and persists irrespective of changes in regulations, curricula, trends or policies in the formal sphere is often where innovation happens. Just as it takes time for formal education to take up ideas generated by activists, so invisible education formed of hidden pleasures and obsessions is often ahead of the educational curve. This narrative is a pleasing one, but the terms of precarity mean that young working class people do not have the networks or resources to accrue benefits. They may generate new knowledge for others to capitalise on. This is one of the conundrums of invisible education. Linking with the thoughts on volunteering, progression in the creative industries essentially relies on volunteering, unpaid work which may be formalised as internships but still operates in a voluntary capacity. To succeed at this crucial unpaid stage and be the ideal creative worker requires flexibility, resources, transport, accommodation in the right places, ability to survive without wages as well as self-confidence and cultural capital, as we found in our research on student work placements (see Allen, Quinn, Hollingworth and Rose, 2013). Learning how to work without being officially a worker is a pervasive trend in invisible education. In some respects, such invisible education in ‘employability’ is regarded more highly than qualifications that may not translate into work-readiness. An invisible education graduate is well placed to succeed, but the question is who is able to get to that point? Exceptions to the rule will always be quoted: individuals who triumph against the odds are exemplars of social mobility, but very many more remain invisible in every sense. Conclusion

Invisible education produces alternative knowledges which cannot be sourced in the formal sphere and which shape values, meaning, resistance and pleasure in fundamental ways. Activism is one form of invisible education which saturates lives and continues to shape them long after the protests themselves have stopped. In contexts of conflict, lessons learnt through violence can be used to propel transformative global movements. Everyday acts such as weaving or graffiti speak to cultural knowledges that cannot be suppressed. Volunteering may indirectly connect the volunteer to ways of understanding the world not offered in the

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classroom. Those who fail the formal system may still love everyday learning, and their interests and activities potentially change the world of work. References Alaimo, S. (2010). States of suspension: transcorporeality at sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476–93. Allen, K., Quinn, J., Hollingworth, S. and Rose, A. (2013). Becoming employable students and ‘ideal’ creative workers: exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(3), 431–52. DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2012.714249 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2020). Influx and Efflux. Durham: Duke University Press. Clancy, S., Harman, K. and Jones, I. (2022). Special issue on lived experience, learning, community activism and social change. Studies in the Education of Adults, 54(2), 123–27. DOI: 10.1080/02660830.2022.2105551 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Earle, C. (2014). An Exploration of the Pedagogy of the London Occupy! Movement and its Implications: Making Hope Possible against Liberal Enclosure from the Streets to the Academy and Back. PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University. Erpenbeck, J. (2020). Not a Novel. London: Granta. Fitzsimons, C. (2022). Critical education in the Irish repeal movement. Studies in the Education of Adults, 54(2), 128–44. DOI: 10.1080/02660830.2022.2077532 Gamson, W. and Sifry, M.C. (2015). The #Occupy movement: an introduction. The Sociological Quarterly, 54, 159–228. Ging, D. and Siapera, E. (2019). Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, B. (2012). A giant human hashtag: learning and the #Occupy movement. In: Hall, B.L., Clover, D.E., Crowther, J. and Scandrett, L. eds. Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of Social Movements. Rotterdam: Senso, pp. 27–40. Holdsworth, C. and Quinn, J. (2012). The epistemological challenge of higher education student volunteering: “reproductive” or “deconstructive” volunteering. Antipode, 44(22), 386–405. Ingold, T. (2015). The Life of Lines. Oxon: Routledge. Jaffe, S. (2016). Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. New York: Nation Press. Kazimi, O., Khademi, K. Torres, M. and Ozgen, E. (2022). Above Us the Milky Way, Derry: Void Gallery. Kurkov, A. (2022). Tales of transcarpathia. Financial Times, 11/12 June, p. 4. Lawrence, D. H. (2001). Poems of the Sea. In Mclatchy, J.D., ed. London: Everyman Library. Lovink, G. (2016). Social Media Abyss. Cambridge: Polity Press. Neary, M. and Amsler, S. (2012). Occupy: a new pedagogy of space and time. Critical Journal of Education Studies, 10(2), 106–38. Neimanis, A. (2017). Water and knowledge. In: Christian, D. and Wong, R., eds. Downstream: Reimagining Water. Quebec: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 51–68. Quinn, J. (2010). Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital: Learning to Belong. London: Bloomsbury.

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Quinn, J. (2016a). Student community engagement though a posthuman lens: the transcorporeality of student and sea. In: Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C. , eds., Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 206–20. Quinn, J. (2016b). Poetry and posthumanism: riding the waves of qualitative research. Paper presented at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, May, as part of the symposium: Starting Somewhere Else. Quinn, J. (2018). Respecting young people’s informal learning: circumventing strategic policy evasions. Policy Futures in Education, 16(2), 144–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782​ 1031​7736​223. Quinn, J., Lawy, R. and Diment, K. (2008). Young People in Jobs without Training in South West England: Not Just ‘Dead-end Kids in Dead-end Jobs’. Exeter: Marchmont Observatory, University of Exeter. Schmidt, S. J. and Babits, C. (2014). Occupy Wall Street as a curriculum of space. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 38, 79–89. Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Strom, K. (2018). Affirmative ethics, posthuman subjectivity and intimate scholarship: a conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In: Strom, K., Mills, T. and Ovens, A. eds. Decentralizing the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 179–88. Weatherall, R. (2023). Reimagining Academic Activism. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

5 INVISIBLE BEINGS Postverbal People and the Invisible Education of Care

This chapter will focus on the everyday life and learning of those positioned as invisible beings because they do not communicate in words. Words have been seen as the distinguishing feature of the human, moving beyond words thus illuminates the posthuman in action. The chapter will draw on research with people living with dementia, learning difficulties, autism, acquired brain injury and recovery from stroke with their families and carers. The research positioned them as postverbal not non-verbal. The chapter uses their engagement with music as a trigger to explore what invisible education may be like for those excluded from the formal word-focused educational realm. It also focuses on how postverbal people engage in and lead invisible education in the home. In doing so it considers what they teach about understanding being and education differently. It will also argue that the work of caring should be understood as a form of invisible education and explore what important lessons are learnt and how. Finally it outlines the challenges this research poses to human-centric formal education (Figure 8). Beyond the word

The word itself false, a device to refute perception. (Louise Gluck, 2006, from ‘October’) It is a philosophical and common-sense assumption that being able to articulate oneself in words is what distinguishes the human from the ‘less than human’ animal. Rancière (2010), for example, defines the human as one who possesses DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-5

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FIGURE 8 Sensory

room Plymouth Music Zone.

the ability to articulate language, and democracy as only being open to ‘speaking subjects’. Posed the question: What makes a human? in the podcast of the same name, actor and writer Stephen Fry simply responded: ‘words, words, words’. When a participant living with dementia in our Beyond Words study said: ‘words make you nice’, she seemed to be gesturing that words confer acceptance and social suitability. They also must be the right words in the right language, and those who do not command this can be excluded and disparaged. The Feeling their Way study explored in Chapter 3 shows that even those on the margins themselves may set up words-based hierarchies. The idea of ‘voice’ is a dominant one in education, tied to a humanist belief in an essential self who ‘knows who she is, says what she means and means what she says’ (MacLure, 2013, p. 104). As critiqued in Quinn (2010) and Quinn and Blandon (2020), the drama of voice is intrinsic to a liberatory view of lifelong learning: if silenced subjects can speak their truth, what Freire calls ‘coming to voice’, then this will be a first step to making them free. For Freire the emphasis is on a communal voice of the oppressed, but in much lifelong learning literature voice is presented as a triumph of the self and as a claim of the right to be a human subject. The simplistic valorisation of voice is ubiquitous, but it raises numerous problems. First it ignores the fact that speech is discursively produced and consists of cultural narratives, it is not an individual possession. Second the moment of speech is a performance not a truth for all time. Third there is no direct conduit between feeling and speech and much of the affective domain cannot be expressed. All these factors mean that the mere fact of saying words is not a guarantor of

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anything. Most significantly the emphasis on words leaves those without access to words outside of the category human. In Portable Magic, Emma Smith (2022) reminds the reader of the significance of the book in human lives and societies and of the many pleasures the book affords. The book as material, symbolic and metaphorical object has been central to the project of being human. One of the care home residents in The Power of Songs expressed this evocatively: ‘(singing) has been the start of a new leaf of a book about me’. The book is the apogee of the word. Even when the book may exist in other forms as audio or digital, the world remains key to formal education. The educated human is one who is familiar with words and can use them well. Yet there are many who do not or cannot use words and all of us might become one at some point, or be connected to them (Figure 9): Today we went to visit Caroline again. She is now nearly beyond words. Seeing her always provokes thinking, talking and feeling, it is precious, even though seeing her with a brain tumor is so cruel. It was of the utmost importance that Caroline got her PhD, a crucial task for me as her Director of Studies. Her last words to me were ‘I’m so proud’. Having this formal validation after many years of feeling that her ideas and being were marginal, wrong, strange, was a triumph. Yet her research, exploring everyday living and learning within an eco-community, her ‘nights with the trees’ was a beautiful example of uncredentialised invisible education. She is stoic and polite even after being bed-ridden for more than a year, her formative years have made her this way. At

FIGURE 9 Photo

‘The Farewell’, Evelyn Williams, owned by the author.

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the same time the wild side is there. Caroline looks like a woman in an Evelyn Williams painting, her eyes fixed on somewhere the rest of us cannot see. ( JQ diary) Posthumanists already problematise the assumed co-construction of human and voice. As Mazzei (2016, p. 158) argues ‘there is no separate, individual person to which a single voice can be linked … all are entangled … there is no present conscious, coherent individual who speaks the truth of her present or her past’. However, even in this posthuman scenario there are words and voices. In his novel Lean Fall Stand John McGregor (2021) tries to portray aphasia after stroke, where words cease to be the prime mode of communication. The revelation of plot and of the dramatic events leading to the stroke are only finally accomplished when the central character takes part in dance and theatre, not through his explication in words. The novel also enters the world of the carer, the loneliness and frustration that happen when words are taken away. What is invisible education like when it happens beyond the word and what can this contribute to posthuman thinking? To explore this question, this chapter draws on Beyond Words: research with people we conceptualised as postverbal, plus their families and carers, a study already referred to in Chapter 3. This research (Quinn, Blandon and Batson, 2017), funded by Arts Council England and conducted in collaboration with community music organisation Plymouth Music Zone (PMZ), was a longitudinal study. It involved 16 months of observations of 25 postverbal people and their engagement in the weekly music sessions PMZ run. The observations were initially descriptive, but later were designed to use a series of prompts generated by the research and by posthuman readings: bodies, silence, beyond words communication, things, time, space, group interaction, responsiveness, respect, music making, inclusion and becoming. There were also 44 in-depth interviews with participants’ families and carers, 30 arts workshops with the postverbal participants and 4 focus groups with music leaders and volunteers. The multiple forms of data acts (Gale, 2018) allowed for different diffractions, perspectives and movements over time. There was no emerging fixed identity for the participants, rather multiple beings and becomings. The study explored engagement with music but in this chapter, music will be considered as a trigger and entry point that reveals some broader issues about invisible education beyond the word. Christine moving strongly side to side, waving holding hands, touching her hair, moving in rhythm with shaking song. Noises like birds whilst making movements with her hands. Like a gymnast with her flexibility. Smiling, laughing, banging the drum. Christine goes round and takes people by the hand and pulls them up and dances with them, very deliberate and strong. Find myself always asking ‘What does that mean?’ It’s the wrong question. What’s the right question? ‘What’s happening?’ (Film of music session, JQ notes)

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Invisible beings

I feel she is a great joy. She doesn’t have awareness of the world around her, no inhibitions, no worries. She’s just a being. (Christine’s mother, interview) The participants in our study either did not speak at all, said very few words, spoke in ways that others could not understand or made loud noises or high-pitched sounds which sounded like singing. In some cases, they had never spoken, or only to selected people, in others coherent speech had been removed by injury or illness and partners had to ‘learn their language all over again’. The research revealed the many ways in which they communicated with others beyond words: body position, eyes pointing, tension in the body, facial expressions, tones, noises, leading by the hand were all mentioned in interviews and observed in fieldwork. As one interview said, ‘you take it right back to the core’. This involved carers and music leaders noting and responding to the slightest movement, as ‘when Liam’s eyes flip up’ or when he makes a tiny movement: Liam has a life threatening and life limiting genetic condition … He absolutely adores when she plays the saxophone and he absolutely beams whenever the saxophone comes near him and he automatically puts his head, the little movement that he has, he moves his body towards the sound and he is feeling for the vibrations. (Liam’s mother, interview) The term commonly used to describe our participants was ‘non-verbal’ which positioned them in terms of lack. Instead, we developed the term ‘postverbal’ to give the sense that they are beyond words and communicating in other ways. This has been well received and used by their families and others more widely. Thinking with Harney and Moten (2013) suggests that what we found was beyond, beyond words, entering another domain where words no longer had any power of categorisation at all. For Christine ‘because she can’t speak she doesn’t care. She just enjoys it and she does it’. Christine will lick a wall, suck her clothes, twiddle her hair, bang her head. Words, rather than being liberating, may be tools of repression. Without the burden of words, the body can move freely. Words are what divides the world into binaries: what is normal and what is not. I’m not the best dancer. I’ve always felt self-conscious. Christine has made me. She has to get up and dance we might be the only ones on the dancefloor. JQ: Would you have done it before Christine? No, no way, never. (Christine’s mother, interview)

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The research observations often noted that communication itself was a dance: ‘a slow-motion dance’ amongst stroke survivors, a ‘modern dance’ amongst people living with dementia. In some respects, the postverbal people were very publicly visible through the noses they made or the unfamiliar movements of their body; but they were then quickly made invisible. Family members spoke of ‘the looks’ they were given by other people, and the turning away. ‘They still tend to like pull their kids away from you in case it’s catching.’ Sometimes families and friends themselves were the ones to turn away, abandoning people living with dementia as ‘not there anymore’ or leaving stroke survivors isolated. Those who cared for postverbal people were also made invisible and left to cope alone: ‘the family I thought I had now doesn’t exist’. The interviews revealed the many ways in which health and social care had failed: the lack of information, communication or respect in which they were treated. Sometimes the isolation and pressure pushed carers near to breakdown and total collapse. Despite this invisibility, the research showed that everyday learning could still happen, even at the most extreme points, such as very late stages of dementia, and that families themselves were involved in invisible education through caring. I don’t know why I say he understands … I mean there is certainly at a level which is totally below words there is an emotional communication that is possible. JQ: Yes, yes. I mean I have no evidence for that except that I have seen it. (Robert’s stepdaughter, interview) Ofsted (2019), the organisation for regulating teaching in England, asserts in its handbook that learning is ‘an alteration in long-term memory’. According to the inspectorate, ‘If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned’. This means that those, such as people in our study, living with shortterm memory, or without any conception of memory, cannot be said to learn. It is another way in which they are made invisible and placed outside Education. In contrast, recognising their invisible education shows that, rather than being a simple question of memory and the repetition of what has already been done, education is the opening up of possibility for what might be to come; and this possibility always exists. We have previously used the research to focus on the potential for learning in dementia and how this must become part of a lifelong learning agenda (see Quinn, 2022; Quinn and Blandon, 2017, 2020). This chapter will move to connect the full range of postverbal participants with the concept of invisible education and to consider the invisible education that happens in their homes.

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Music as invisible education

We all believe that it’s a level playing field that everybody can be involved in so it’s allowing the music sometimes to take over where words and language sometimes struggle. (Music Leaders, focus group 1) The Power of Songs research had already touched on relations between music and voice. According to the music leaders, care home residents who normally speak ‘gobbledegook language’ or do not speak at all were able to join in and sing the words of the songs. Beyond Words was able to proceed in much greater depth to explore how engagement with music might help in stimulating learning and communication for postverbal people. For a detailed discussion of how music leaders facilitated this, see Quinn, Blandon and Batson (2019). The focus on the postverbal participant and on unspoken aspects like body language, spatial and visual environments, culture and ethos were all important factors in this process, yet they are not widely researched nor understood. Because of the longitudinal nature of the study, Beyond Words was able to show changes over time with improvements in speech, mobility and confidence, for example, but this is not the focus of this chapter. Although community music provision is not seen as an educational activity, as such the study shows how music forms part of the spectrum of invisible education, as do other creative initiatives at a community level. As discussed in Chapter 3, The Power of Songs shows that the song is an ‘immaterial thing’ that helps shape a sense of being in the world and a connecting point to history and culture. For the women escaping domestic abuse in Feeling their Way music gives them a time where they are not asked to dwell on their own history, a space where they can be in the moment, neither looking back nor forwards. you are able to express yourself through music and it does give you that, even for just a couple of hours it gives you that feeling of you haven’t got to think about anything else, it’s just what you are creating. (Abby, interview) For postverbal people, music can be an access point to a form of learning where ‘the signs to music’ take the place of words. It is a different new learning world which provides escape from the sensory pains and confines of words: JQ: And how important is it do you think that he has creative activities like music to be involved in? I suppose it makes how he expresses himself rather than say the actual verbal communication. It is hard for him to reason why he thinks and feels the way he

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does and express himself in a certain way so maybe it’s how he expresses how he feels you know where maybe he can’t say it or communicate otherwise, just like the signs to music. (Mike’s sister, interview) JQ: Can he explain why he doesn’t speak? He says ‘Well something closes in my throat, I want to speak but I can’t, I just can’t … The music talks to me, if other people are playing I know how they are feeling.’ JQ: That’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s absolutely fantastic you know, and people don’t see those things. (Leigh’s father, interview) The research project included 30 arts workshops which were designed to give participants a chance to make their own expressions about how they felt about music without having to use words. There were interesting discussions about how necessary these workshops were. Some in the music organisation felt that observing music sessions would tell you everything you needed to know and that the arts workshops might be superfluous. However, to design an opportunity for  the participants to engage directly with the research questions, through a means that foregrounded postverbal communication, was ethically vital for the research team. To refer back to discussions in Chapter 2, it was their right to participate on their terms. The aim was not to look at the finished product and then interpret what it ‘said’ but to explore the workshops as affective environments. As Stewart (2007, p. 4) suggests, the aim was to approach things: that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull … not to finally ‘know’ them—to collect them into a good enough story of ‘what’s going on’ but … to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate. The workshops were run by a practicing artist who had many years of experience working with community groups. Here words were not the currency but paint, paper, clay and pastels and as music played, participants were encouraged to use them in any way they wanted in response to the music. To link the sessions with the community music organisation, the music was live, played by a music leader and most sessions were filmed and discussed by the research team. It is difficult to ‘analyse’ the findings of the workshops or to ‘say’ what the art works ‘mean’. Instead, bodies and intuitions were brought into play to feel the affects the workshops generated. The stroke survivors group, which included postverbal people and their verbal partners, took part in several arts workshops. The video

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of the sessions showed the flow of response to different forms of music and how this materialised—on paper. The videos showed ripples across the group, how the group responded communally and was an ‘agentic assemblage’ (Bennett, 2010) with music as the animating force, rather than a collection of separate individuals. I used drumming on congas and bongos. The energy on the room completely changed with the strong influence of rhythm patterns. Chris physically locked into the rhythms being played and mirrored them by physically playing into the beat on the paper on the wall. (Arts workshop, music leader notes) The objective of the session was to work with the textures in clay that resonate with the music. We did this by making small A6 sized tiles and pressing into the surface of the clay textures that the participants felt reflected how the music ‘impressed’ on their bodies. As the session progressed the atmosphere became very quiet with a kind of focused intensity … how they responded to music texturally, how the music ‘played their bodies’ not through colour and mark—making so much as texture and impression. (Arts workshop, artist notes) The arts workshops showed the corporeality of learning, how music and the responses to it were not from the mind and the word but from the body. Some who could say a few words had individual art workshops and were asked where their responses came from. Leigh gestured to his heart, Carl spoke of ‘his mind’s eye and heart’. Not all responses were happy ones. Bill drew lines that resembled a cage. When asked what was in it, he responded, ‘Myself ’. This was the only clear word he ever spoke. Learning affects

Any gesture was, whatever else, like freeing something from your hand, some living thing that would touch or settle wherever it happened to be carried. (Marilynne Robinson, 2020, Jack, p. 140) Erin Manning (2016) has conceptualised ‘the minor gesture’ as: ‘a gesture felt in the event both as absolutely singular and infinitely multiplicious’ (p. 65), ‘the felt experience of potential’ (p. 75). One of the most powerful producer of such affect in Beyond Words was one when hardly anything happened. Jane is in her sixties but looks younger despite her vacant expression. She has advanced dementia and tends

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to circle the care home where she lives, rarely stopping to sit down and almost never speaking. Her children have taught themselves to say that she is ‘dead’: Jane seems confused, lost … sometimes she makes gestures as though she is going to start to cry. I can see she is breathing rapidly as though she has realized something terrible has happened. (Observations) The research team had prolonged debates about the ethics of doing an arts workshop with her as the artist did not know of a fitting way to engage her. Finally, drawing on growing reflections about the links between textures and music, she decided to bring a basket of materials as well as chalks and other arts materials to use in conjunction with the music and to film the session. Later the research team watched the film. The music leaders played softly at the side of the room, Jane looked ahead, as her expression of anguish imprinted itself on our retinas and deepened as they played ‘Homeward Bound’. We could not speak there were only tears. Finally, she touched a sparkly scarf and turned and looked at the musicians. As the care assistant came to fetch her, she picked up the sparkly scarf, put it around her neck and walked away. To the researcher who had been observing her for weeks this degree of involvement and interest was remarkable and unprecedented. Did the music rekindle vitality for Jane? Did intra-activity with the textile? There are no words to explain or confirm it: only the glitter of a sparkly scarf. New postverbal learning worlds

Through the intra-activity of postverbal person and music new worlds emerged. These worlds are challenging and surprising. The music does not produce repetition, but rather in Biesta’s (2015, p. 5) words is ‘a new beginning’. It is an education, but one that cannot be articulated in words. Carl has experienced traumatic brain injury and now needs 24-hour care. He can speak a little, but is very difficult to understand. As he has short-term memory, he constantly repeats the same statements. Carl is a public figure, well-known and greeted in his town, and he is always seen at rock and heavy metal concerts there. However, no-one but carers ever come to visit him in his home, where music also plays day and night. In one of the arts workshops in our study he was given long paint brushes, paints and long rolls of paper on the floor. Music played loudly as he swirled around the room in his wheelchair. His piratical rockstar clothes and rings all had ‘thing power’, producing the intensity of the room. At the end of the session, he said he wished he had a partner: He painted what he felt the music was saying and he was so intense so focused, he loves that expressing himself I think getting out what’s inside … it does

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solidify something in you that was there that you see in the depths of him, the depths of music and the importance of it in his life, yes and it’s a huge thing. (Carl’s carer, Helen, interview) The new world ‘solidifies’, born of music and movement and expressed not in words but in paint. It is a new learning world, bringing new knowledge about music and the capacities of the body. It sends vibrations out to those watching, learning affect, about what music does. Without music Carl cannot generate this new world; it is like the oxygen of this invisible education. For others, the new world might be much more private. Tim generates a new world every time he closes his bedroom door when television, music and the sorting of postcards or videos all intra-act productively. Visitors are not welcome, as his mother says: ‘he doesn’t like you in his world’. Barad (2007, p. 818) sees agency, not as an attribute, but as ‘the ongoing reconfiguring of the world’. The research indicated that music promoted agency in this sense of redistribution and reconfiguring of relations. Postverbal people are assumed to lack agency because they cannot explain themselves, but participants did not take the music sessions straight, they played and performed according to their own rules, changing the shape. The MLs introduced a different exercise with three sets of instruments. … At one point he asked for volunteers. Hannah stood up and went straight up to the front. She started playing each instrument one at a time and then made the signal to stop, everyone applauded, and she stood there and started to cry. Tim’s interactions with the piece of paper given out is very interesting. He always accepts the piece of paper and holds it in front of him whilst the other hand is moving and making gesticulations, … he opens and closes his mouth pretending to sing. It seems he is creating the illusion, ‘performing’ the action of singing. (Observation, music session, Centre for People with Learning Difficulties) In this session four people were present including Carl. They continued to work on the same piece of music using different electronic instruments … Carl seems to be an extrovert who thrives on attention he likes banter, flirting with and ‘shocking people’ I noticed he needed help with the headphone, his jacket and other things … He seemed able to concentrate on the session and join in when he was expected although a bit delayed … The session ended with a recording of the music piece they had created. The ML told me that Carl had made several decisions without consulting them … The ML believed that Carl had got bored with the app they had suggested and simply chose a different sound. (Observation music session, PMZ hub)

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Rancière’s (2010) speaking subject is assumed to be one who can articulate their views. Democracy depends on such rational articulation. In contrast the postverbal participants made their desires known directly through their bodies and acts. As previously discussed, it is commonly assumed that there is a direct line between words and identity, whilst bodies are construed as mysterious in their workings. Countermanding such assumptions can be very difficult, but there is a postverbal lesson here, which posthumanism, in its insistence on the significance of acts and the body is able to read (see Braidotti, 2013). Postverbal lessons in the home: ‘this is what we do with Mike’

Interviewing families in the Beyond Words project gave privileged glimpses into how they understood and described their home lives with postverbal people. This sets up a chain, not of direct representation, but of words used to evoke postverbal ways of life, with all the contradiction this implies. Being involved in the community music sessions in the first place and then being willing to be interviewed mean they have passed through several filters before they come to interview. This might imply an investment in presenting positive stories or traumatic ones, but in fact the interviews tended to mix both. What emerged as particularly interesting were descriptions of everyday life, within the home, presented as asides but in fact revealing much. The invisible education of home life, how the everyday is played out through rituals and symbols, was another incidental learning affect. The postverbal person often took the lead. Leigh’s father said ‘we’re always astounded by what he’s going to show us’ and this sense of amazement and mystery was an everyday feeling across the interviews. Adam is not commonly regarded as an able learner at all, because of his Down’s syndrome, autism and hearing loss. Yet his home sees him lead his family through complex crescendos of music: If you start playing a tune on the bells he copies you and you end up copying him. The more intricate it gets, the harder it is to keep up with him. He composes tunes and taps them out on the table and keyboards … he has his own tune in mind, and it gets more and more intricate as it goes on. He likes to challenge us. (Adam’s mother, interview) Daily life in Adam’s house is thus a stream of educational activity. In fact, he is more than a learner but a teacher: JQ: What else have you learned because of Adam? A new appreciation of music and other ways of communicating … For Adam it’s a deeper thing because we don’t have verbal conversation, music is a much

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more level playing field. His appreciation of music is different, it’s his voice in a lot of ways. Adam’s parents are musicians who play in a band, but it is Adam who has taught ‘a new appreciation of music’ because of this everyday immersion in a musical conversation with him. His parents value the community music organisation very highly, they provide essential resources for pleasure, inclusion and wellbeing. However, the invisible education that happens in their home is even more important to all the family, it is the fabric of their lives. Mike was fifty and had learning difficulties and autism. In observation videos of music sessions he seemed impassive, almost blank. Interviewing his mother was a fascinating surprise: On a Saturday he likes to do a play OK? I do it with him and then the following week my husband does it with him, OK? And this has gone back for years and years … And er so he’ll, we’ll do the play and then he has to have the title for the following week, OK? Then he’ll get the props out and then he will draw the picture. JQ: And does he act it out with you? Yes, he does. JQ: But that is amazing, so he has taught you how to do plays? Yes. JQ: Would you have ever done anything like that do you think without Mike? No absolutely not, No, he is, you know, that is what we do with Mike. (Mike’s mother, interview) The pictures that Mike makes are experimental works of art, similar in process to those of Frank Auerbach: layers upon layers, much like the layering of this weekly ritual: he will have put a drawing on top of a drawing on top of a drawing, Ok? All on the same page, and so at the end of it it’s just an absolute mass of colour with no specific lines. The narratives that the plays follow are archetypes of rescue from harm, where a ‘bad person gets their comeuppance at the end’. If Mike sees the work ‘dead’ or ‘death’ in a newspaper he will blot it out with black pen. It is impossible to say what this ‘means’, but what it does is enmesh the family in a world where trouble is vanquished and obliterated; at least for a short time. Mike is the agent, the propelling force teaching his parents the mechanics of drama, weaving spells of survival for them in their challenging lives. It is reminiscent of the family in Roz

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Chast’s (2014) graphic memoir Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant, where every technique is deployed to ward off any acknowledgement of terminal illness. Yet the drama is pleasurable too, and it allows a reinscribing of hope every single Saturday. The invisible education of caring

Like all research projects something unexpected always emerges. In Beyond Words we chose to interview families and carers as one of a range of ways to explore our core participants, the postverbal people, and to think how the benefits of the music might spread to families themselves. In practice the in-depth interviews suggested so much more about everyday learning. The interviews, mostly 2 hours long or more, made visible the painstaking work of care and how much has been learnt slowly over time. This can be understood as a form of invisible education that operates on multiple levels. On one level it is learning the being you care for: how to understand their needs even when they cannot express them in words, how to respond to them, and to those with similar needs. You see the world in a different way when it comes to Adam… Having to understand him on such a level, to know what he needs that you can second guess him. You find something quite deep within yourself. JQ: Can you say more about the word ‘deep’? With Adam it’s all very much at that moment, what’s happening later is of no interest to Adam… With Adam if you are with him, you are with him. (Adam’s mother, interview) The postverbal person teaches their carer to understand the world in a different way: one with a different experience of time and matter. This is ‘deep’ it seems because it is so fundamental, requiring that accepted human timeframes be set aside and with them the idea of postponed gratification, of acting towards a future outcome. It is reminiscent of the young people in Chapter 4 who had given up on striving for qualifications and just wanted to ‘float’. As well as learning to be present, the carer may also learn more about the quality of the material world and how it is composed. Ethan has helped me to understand things differently. For us having a child like Ethan makes you appreciate things more makes you notice all the little things before you didn’t notice… Ethan looks at the world in a different way than we do. When we are out for a walk, he notices the detail in something, picks things up. (Ethan’s mother, interview)

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Ethan responds to what Bennett (2010) calls the vibrant matter of the world around him ‘makes you notice all the little things’ and draws his family into that web of relationality with the more than human. He challenges notions of scale and importance. In their different spacetimematterings Adam and Ethan teach their families posthuman practices of everyday living. Part of the experience of care for the postverbal person was acceptance of both mystery and bald facts. Thoughts would not be put into words, at the same time actions were direct and unequivocal. Tim could not explain what he got from watching Dr Who repeatedly, but he would watch it and that was that. The interviews suggested that it was through the postverbal person that forms of creativity were generated: dancing, drama, attending symphony orchestras were all activities that only happened because of the influence of the postverbal person. The work of care and its difficulties has been acknowledged, but it is not usually seen as educational. Care has been positioned as a low-level activity, and professional carers are seen as uneducated people worthy of only the lowest wages and worst job conditions. Without family, friends and neighbours giving care, society would collapse, but they are treated as an invisible ‘reserve army of labour’. However, the interviews and the observations of family involvement within PMZ music sessions suggested how much of value had been learnt from care and how remarkable these carers had become—not only parents but some children and siblings too. In posthuman terms these are lessons about bodies and capacities. The lesson is that it is normal to be ‘imperfect’ that the human body is not inviolable and must be seen in all its difference. For some this clarity of vision extended to becoming a medical expert about the person they care for; but the knowledge was also more philosophical. They echoed Briadotti’s (2013, p. 15) critique of humanism as having produced the others ‘the different’ as ‘disposable bodies’ in its formation around the figure of a perfect human: You know it’s part of life, things go wrong, when you think of the billions of things that can go wrong in the human body why should you avoid them? You know it happens, people are born without limbs, people are born with being damaged, people are born you know with lots of different things, others it happens to its car accidents or infections or disease or whatever, but these things happen, why would you turn away from it? Having said that eighteen years ago (before Freya) I might not have felt the same. (Ethel, Freya’s mother, interview) Not ‘turning away’ from the damaged and the imperfect was part of what they had learnt. With this visibility of the body came sharpened senses: the material world becomes more present and vital. As discussed in Chapter 3 things play

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their part and the carer has learned how to become highly tuned into their vibrations: It’s like now you notice things that you never noticed before. I notice people’s shoes JQ: Do you? Yes, yes, because a lot of special needs kids get special shoes… you see the shoes and you know they are not an ordinary kid, there’s something wrong that they need those shoes to do. You notice doorways, can you get them in? Is it wide enough?… Can I get her up that hill, is that cobblestone too difficult to go on? Is it slippy? … Things that you wouldn’t normally notice, only time I noticed cobblestones was if I was in my stilettos when I was in my teens, do you know what I mean? (Ethel, interview) Shoes, doorways and cobblestones are no longer in the background but jostle for attention. Invisible education can make hidden things visible. Invisible education also gave lessons about relationality and community, so that a carer like Molly, who was previously quiet and obedient, had become a vocal advocate for social justice since her husband’s stroke: JQ: You said ‘this equal thing is much to the forefront of my mind’. That seems very important. Could you say a bit more about that? I feel that everybody in the world is equal to everybody else. It doesn’t matter your situation, your colour, your culture whatever, we are all human beings, we are all lucky to be human beings. The fact that some of us suffer from health problems or disability shouldn’t matter, there is enough able-bodied people in the world to be able to take on that challenge if you like of accepting a person who isn’t a hundred percent the same. I am very, very, I feel very strong about that, very strong. (Molly, Chris’s wife, interview) Posthuman researchers have become increasingly interested in the work of Hannah Arendt and her ‘love of the world’ (see Braidotti, 2013). The carers used their love to insist that this world must include postverbal people and others who do not fit the script of the ‘human being’. They permeated what they had learned through to the world around them in their advocacy and through the potentia generated by love and witness. This is not to suggest that carers should be grateful for the opportunities for self-development provided by sleepless nights and constant physical and mental stress: but they repeatedly insisted how much they had learned about life and about themselves.

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Challenging humancentric education

Recognising that postverbal people and their families are learning every day in the home challenges humanistic views of what education is and should be. Education and humanism are tightly bound. Education is how one becomes the best possible human and the means that education takes is formulated through a vision of what a human might be: it is a self-fulfilling cycle. The human is rational and self-contained and can articulate ‘his’ own position. Historically many were positioned both outside of the human and of education; notably women and slaves. As previously suggested, Education operated by means of the word and the book. Education is perceived as a linear and formal project which is about maximising individual potential and benefits. It is certified and it has utility. Other projects that take place in the home, such as learning new skills in later life (see Vanderbilt, 2020), are still positioned as making the most of ourselves as humans. All that activity is future oriented, working towards some culmination whereby the human will be perfected. The postverbal people taught a different view of time and purpose: As you go along you realise time doesn’t matter very much. Christine has taught me a lot, I love her to bits, she’s just uncomplicated. I like the simplicity of it it’s lovely. The take it in the minute, the now, you can’t worry about the future, no-one knows what will happen. (Christine’s mother, interview) In the world of formal education postverbal people are on the periphery. A discourse of inclusion focuses on making adaptions so that they can be as much part of the ‘normal’ community as possible. There is another perspective that gives them a central position in how society is developing and progressing: JQ: Freya, her creativity or contribution to the community, to the world… What is her contribution do you feel to the rest of us? I think people like Freya teach other people quite a lot like patience, understanding, acceptance… ingenuity, problem solving, people like her drive technology. OK they want to go to the moon and the technology for the moon now works the wheelchair, but wheelchairs also help drive technology to go to the moon… … It makes you creative. She makes you think differently and people who work with you think differently… People like her give quite a lot to others if they are willing to accept it, if they are willing to look for it, if they are willing to work with it. (Freya’s mother, interview) Even transformative views of education focus on literacy and the setting free of suppressed voices. In the invisible education of postverbal people the word and

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the voice are not the centre, in fact they disappear. Learning is focused on the moment; it is ineffable and often hidden. As part of the research, we conducted a focus group with volunteers at PMZ, including someone who had lived without words after brain damage and someone currently working with people who do not speak. They really helped us to break through some of our own ways of thinking and I was intrigued to see the sea rush in again here: As humans we have a fear of the unknown. I know a lot of people are afraid of the bottom of the ocean as they don’t know what’s down there. What’s it like working with people who don’t communicate verbally? It’s wonderful. You can go on these amazing journeys, it’s non-linear. It is wonderful because it makes you think about the world a bit differently. (Volunteers’ focus group) For many educators, helping students to ‘think about the world differently’ is the goal of education. Postverbal invisible education casts a new world: ‘intense’, ‘deep’, present, bodily, which demands that old fears and assumptions are jettisoned. Music may present an entry point to this new world like the word provides entry to the world of formal education; whether it be via PMZ, through family music making or by downloading music from YouTube. More than this, postverbal people are already generating their own diverse forms of invisible education in the home in daily life. Conclusion: fertile beings

The formal education system of social mobility proceeds by producing waste products, such as young people in low-waged jobs discussed in Chapter 4. Postverbal people are similarly cast as waste: ‘people do tend to think if you have lost everything you have lost your humanity, but you haven’t’. Future mutabilities suggests there are no fixed positions and what is perceived as finished and binned can become fertile compost, as with Tent City University. It also suggests that insisting on quantifiable measurements is misguided: …how you quantify the benefit that they derive from these (music)visits is just impossible, apart from that moment in time when perhaps they may just react, that is excellent and then an hour later or minutes later they won’t remember that someone was there and they reacted to it, but in the moment, that bubble, why not stimulate that bubble? ( Jane’s husband, interview)

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The music leaders as educators have learnt to reevaluate time. The ephemeral is not a lost cause or an irrelevance; even though, paradoxically, they are forced by tight and uncertain budgets to stringently cost every moment. I get very motivated about knowing that people might not live for very long or you might lose them at any point, so you kind of want to draw the best that you can out of every little moment that you are with someone, so an hour can be a really rich thing. (Music leaders, focus group 3) Rich not poor, postverbal not non-verbal, learners, not beyond learning: when they become visible postverbal people help to understand being and becoming in a different way. They help to break-free from the straightjackets of humanistic assumptions which bedevil education and society, and still hamper posthuman thinking. References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2015). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chast, R. (2014). Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant. New York: Bloomsbury. Gale, K. (2018). Madness as Methodology. London: Routledge. Gluck, L. (2006). Averno. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–67. Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mazzei, L. M. (2016). Voice without a subject. Cultural Studies—Cultural Methodologies, 16(2), 151–61. McGregor, J. (2021). Lean Fall Stand. London: Fourth Estate. Ofsted (2019). Education Inspection Framework. Quinn, J. (2010). Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital: Learning to Belong. London: Bloomsbury. Quinn, J. (2022). Living and learning in dementia: Implications for re-making community life. In: Evans, R., Kurantowicz, E. and Lucio-Villegas, E. eds. Remaking Communities and Adult Learning. New York: Brill, pp. 110–23. Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2017). The potential for lifelong learning in dementia: a post-humanist exploration. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 36(5), 578–94. DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2017.1345994

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Quinn, J. and Blandon, C. (2020). Lifelong Learning and Dementia: A Posthumanist Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Batson, A. (2017). Beyond Words. Available from: https// plymou​thmu​sicz​one.org.uk Quinn, J., Blandon, C. and Batson, A. (2019). Living beyond words: posthuman reflections on making music with post-verbal people. Arts and Health 13(1), 73–86. DOI: 10.1080/17533015.2019.1652194 Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. New York and London: Continuum. Robinson, M. (2020). Jack. London: Virago. Smith, E. (2022). Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers. London: Allen Lane. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. London: Duke University Press. Vanderbilt, T. (2020). Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. London: Knopf.

6 INVISIBLE COMMUNITIES The Contributions of Invisible Education

This chapter will draw together and discuss the issues raised by invisible education and will consider the implications for educational research and the development of a critical posthumanism. Focusing on how invisible education contributes to the way in which communities are understood, it will present a hopeful but critical vision of future change. Hope is conceived as embodied and affective but also concrete and material, built by communal action and driven by a sense of opening imagined possibilities. This links back to the concept of future mutabilities, and a wider conception of what learning may be, who is learning and why it matters. Introduction

Invisible education is difficult to compress and enumerate, it tends to slip through the fingers like water. In the words of the poet Janet Frame the process is like: Mirrors again. Looking through the surface Diving in to see the under, other world ( from ‘Lines Written at the Frank Sargeson Centre’) My diary entries suggest the difficulties of such diving: How to meet the challenge posed by poets and participants is not straightforward. Like the tidal harbour where I live, ideas and water come in slowly and hopefully but then disappear out again. The wild geese fly in and away again. The harbour returns to what is known as ‘the sod’, green and dreary, and inspiration dries up. The sea has been a constant in my research, although not necessarily visible. DOI: 10.4324/9781003181897-6

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This seemingly random ebb and swell of ideas, certainly not planned nor forethought, has a poetry of its own. Following this movement in this book has been more than a pleasure: it has re-energized my thinking and renewed my desire to do research in synergy with all my reading and thinking. Like the sea, poetry is not separate but a crucial element in my life as a material being and researcher. Nevertheless, I cannot love the sea or poetry without remembering those who drown escaping war and brutality. My duty as a researcher is to be alert to pleasure and to pain. I look to poetry to help me here too, not as an escape, but as a conduit to the contradictions and the messy materialities of life. Alaimo urges us to ‘follow the submersible’ and look to the bottom of the sea in order to challenge our sense of the knoweable world. So much will always remain unknown and invisible; yet does never knowing preclude thinking, feeling, exploring, swimming alongside other human and non-human animals? The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— (Mary Oliver, 2017, from ‘Wild Geese’) ( JQ diary) By using the concept of invisible education, it is possible to uncover ways of learning in everyday life that usually slip under the radar. We are all learning beings, constantly responding to problems and questions in our everyday lives through learning affects, always producing new learning worlds in intra-activity with matter. The book has given some indication of the forms this might take. However, the aim of the book is not to review invisible education, rather to sensitise the reader to its existence and provoke further explorations. Why invisible education?

The use of ‘invisible education’ as an open-ended expression of multiple forms of everyday learning has proven generative for this book. Invisible education unpicks the line between what counts as knowledge and what is either hidden or ignored. It also suggests a tapping into a more than normatively real state. If something is invisible, it has power to move around: to move chairs and tables in the classroom of Education. It can unsettle and even frighten, disturbing and disrupting the fixed ligaments of the discipline. In being invisible it is not bound by what is seen known or spoken and moves into a different space. Simultaneously, it is every day, not specialised or marked as the preserve of a few. It is invisible because it is so embedded in lives and practices that it escapes notice. It is also invisible because it is given little value. Invisible education is a function of daily life for everyone and as such also belongs to those who are positioned outside of Education. When invisible education is recognised, it helps to shift assumptions about knowledge and contributes to the dream of a flat ontology sought by posthumanists. Instead of a hierarchy where some reach peaks of distinction, all are woven into

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invisible webs. The flat plain is made of relations across all forms of matter. This is how the world is on one level, yet at the same time we do not only live in this world, but also in one bound by structures of inequality. By engaging with empirical research, the interplay between possibility and structure is revealed. The research in this book deliberately seeks to engage with those regarded as non-learners or past learning. It suggests how, without formal input, learning affects are produced through the feelings and atmospheres created by daily activities and the problems and questions they engender. It shows how intraactivity constantly produces new worlds and these worlds always have something to teach—they are learning worlds, even if they are not free and unbounded. It might be suggested that informal or non-formal learning are sufficient categories to explore everyday learning, and to add the terminology of invisible education simply muddies the waters. However, these established terms seem indeterminate, used in different ways so that their explanatory power sometimes seems limited. Moreover, they are also tied to the term ‘formal’, being defined by what they lack. Whilst they have the virtue of years of scholarship which should not be discounted, a new concept such as invisible education may potentially open the field in interesting ways. Biesta (2015), who desires to preserve the beauty of the exchange between educator and student, objects to the term ‘learning’ and the way it is commonly used as ‘learnification’, but this is not the reasoning behind the use of invisible education here. I use the term education to underline that this matter is serious and formative an inculcation into the world, in the way Education is deemed to be, but probably often is not. The young people in the jobs without training study had passed through formal education without gaining much more than a sense of their own inadequacy. Through invisible education they sometimes had a sense of purpose, creativity and affinity with others and the more than human. The world educated them, not their schoolteachers. However, moving from education to invisible education does not totally displace teachers. In invisible education there are many unexpected teachers: postverbal people, elders in care homes or animals, for example. Moreover, there are networks all around us such as the singer and the song that form a web taking us through life. The use of memoir in the book helps to reveal this. These are not memoirs which take the narrator through life systematically, in a linear fashion, but memoirs that spin and fragment, revealing the fluid nature of the unself. By drawing on memoir, fiction, poetry and art, I hope to have given a sense of the pervasive nature of invisible education, how it follows through life rather than being a waypoint and a discrete interval. My diary entries too, foster the sense that, as Barad (2007) suggests, the researcher cannot be divided from the research nor take a fixed position on it. What are the knowledges created through invisible education?

Emily Dickinson famously wrote ‘tell it slant’. Invisible education may not be approached head-on but from an angle. To encounter invisible education, see

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what has not been seen, requires a different mode of looking. The knowledge it generates might be understood as fleeting, hardly visible, certainly unquantifiable, but also beyond, beyond representation. This is in tune with the postqualitative moment where claims to be able to straightforwardly represent, or interpret research are called into question. Rather than a neat progression from research question to anticipated knowledge, MacLure (2013) proposes following the ‘glow’ of non-propositional research data. Likewise, Didion (2021) evokes ‘the shimmer’ in the pictures in her mind as the catalyst for her work. With glow and shimmer lighting the way, hidden things come into view across this book: the pull of woods and animals, the power of a song or a wooden spoon, the eloquence of a cardboard sign, the loving rituals of homemade drama. Seen with the eye of  invisible education their significance and potential is recognised, along with what is learnt from them. Similarly, the learning subject gets their due, even when they seem as far as it’s possible to be from education. How does invisible education contribute to critical posthumanism?

Posthumanism suggests a different way of looking at the world, but when it encounters formal education, it may come up against a brick wall. The barriers and boundaries of formal education can seem impervious to change, as can the narrow definition of a human. The category human is a useful one, it enables us to go about daily lives with a container for the mass of sensations and affects we experience. It lends a logic and a rationale to what is otherwise random and bewildering. The container is always being reshaped and we accept this reshaping: the mobile phones that have become extensions of arms, and eyes. Yet at the same time we claim to know what a human essentially is and that they are qualitatively different from any other form of matter. Abstract arguments about what it means to be posthuman only get so far, but all the time postverbal people are demonstrating how it is possible to live without the word or memory and in relationality to all forms of matter. This is the living proof that humanist constructions of what it is to be a person are indeed constructions. By adding invisible education to the field of posthuman postqualitative educational enquiry I am simply saying ‘Look at this’. The injunction to see and explore is openended. Invisible education is beyond, the beyond of education as a concrete discipline and somewhere else altogether. It moves around the home and outside in everyday worlds and affects. It is always, already posthuman and does not have to make itself so. How does invisible education generate hope?

Given the condition of politics, societies and environments globally, keeping conditions of hope is extremely difficult. These are not problems that are out

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there but rather enmeshed in our everyday life. As Max, participant in the Tent City University research, said in interview: there are these fundamental problems, they are serious, we give answers to them whether we think about them or not implicitly, in what we do and how we live and how we think … and it affects us in everything science, humanity, life, government, politics—our whole world. Researching invisible education suggests that this everyday doing, ‘how we live’ can be productive and generative, as well as sometimes cruel and vindictive. It shows the limits formed by structures of poverty, class, racism, violence as well as how everyday learning can foster resistance. The resources to survive are not certificates, but the stores of knowledge that invisible education has built up. Colebrook (2016, p. 103) argues ‘the very existence of concepts such as justice, democracy and hospitality enable the promise of something beyond all conceived present possibilities: the only impossibility is the determination in advance that certain events would be impossible’. To move beyond ‘all conceived present possibilities’ implies a world of future mutabilities, where uncertainty might mean freedom as well as incarceration. Rather than social mobility, which ensures the prevalence of failure so that some might prevail, future mutabilities disputes the terms of success. Christine will never go to university, but she dances like a victorious being and not a marginalised human. Future mutabilities means that positive things can happen as well as negative ones in the fulcrum of change. In Feeling Their Way, Trent is a teenager who had lived in the women’s refuge but then moved on with the help of the music project and continued involvement in PMZ. He is a PMZ success story, but the interview uncovered some of the complex process, turmoil and confusion beneath this celebration. His narrative is not one of social mobility but of mutability: The music made me feel like … I don’t really know, it made me feel like happy and that I could be somewhere else and like not have to be someone else at a different place, so like being the same person but like just not change because you might be scared and that. He evokes the fact that in a violent environment he had to change because he was scared, in the music sessions he could leave that ‘wrong’ place and that person behind. The research studies show what Noel from the Tent City University study called ‘windows of hope’ within invisible education. They also showed people who faced impossible situations and still responded to the possibilities of new learning worlds: I feel very privileged that I’ve been let into some people who are having a really hard time and they have been very trusting with me … it’s been quite

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rewarding seeing mothers and children just making the best of things really. Grabbing hold of an opportunity to make music. (Music leader, interview) What does invisible education offer communities?

Debates on communities tend to circle around who belongs in them and on how to make those who are on the margins feel at home (Neal, Bennett, Cochrane and Mohan, 2019). Community is perceived as a bounded entity that ‘is joined’ or has been ‘lost’ or is ‘lacking’ (Wills, 2016). Studdert and Walkerdine (2016a, 2016b) suggest that there has been too much focus on what ‘community is’, and a lack of attention to ‘how it works’ (2016a, p. 617). In contrast, Neal, Bennett, Cochrane and Mohan (2019, p. 82) see community as doing ‘a continuous act of social mutuality’. Their conclusions are drawn from a study of taking part in leisure activities. Such activities are forms of invisible education, even though they do not consider them in those terms. They argue that: repositioning of community as process and practice … pushes community away from being a geographically or socially bounded category of identity and axis of belonging towards being about a sociality of interdependent necessity. (2019, p. 72) In posthuman terms the ‘sociality of interdependent necessity’ must include diverse forms of matter as well as more-than-human creatures, and relationality would be the terminology used. In all the research projects in this book there was always interdependence and relationality even if only with a sparkly scarf. In activities like activism, the learning process was understanding how everyone and everything was interlinked. So invisible education could be positioned as one of the potential drivers of community. Uncovering invisible education might suggest that there are more different people ‘doing community’ in different places and in different ways than is commonly realised. The doing of invisible education also produces resources for change, giving support for action. People living with dementia, for example have refused to be invisible and become activists campaigning for changes and for recognition of their rights. In turn they are providing valuable sources of invisible education for the wider community, beyond the beyond of Education. In the UK the 3 Nations Dementia Working Group co-ordinates multiple learning activities to demonstrate the capabilities of their peers. The international Reimagining Dementia network founded in the USA challenges negative discourses and practices regarding dementia and is a ‘creative coalition for change’ involving artists, carers, health and social care professionals and researchers as well as people living with dementia. These examples of activism show people living with dementia remaking communities for themselves and generating invisible education at the same time. They demonstrate

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how invisible education crosses international borders and is remade by online connections. Although the research explored here can only suggest the scope of invisible education, it helps to reveal its rich potential for community life. The heyday of adult education is often seen as in the past, a lost treasure or a redundant field, depending on your perspective. Invisible education is an approach that puts learning right at the centre of everyday life and communities and demands to be recognised or validated. Lessons for formal education?

I anticipate the question ‘so what can invisible education do for formal education’? This is probably the wrong question, as it brings us back to the norm and sets everything against it. The key point about invisible education is that it happens whether or not formal education exists, so it deserves to be recognised and explored on its own terms. It implies a resistance to the norm as it embraces everybody and everything; but it does not replace it. There are many criticisms of the formal sphere. Some are spurious, such as seeing universities as bastions of ‘wokedom’ and cultural cancellation. Those serious critiques coming from a radical, feminist or decolonising perspective I would share, but that is not the real business of this book. There are those that try to replace Education with work-based training, as in Multiverse which sidesteps any form of criticality in favour of employer demand: invisible education does not belong in this move. Invisible education is ineffable and unmeasurable. In fact, invisible education is what fosters those parts of education that are most valuable, that sincerely seek social justice or reparation. It is through activism, one of the spheres of invisible education explored here, that movements for anti-racism, environmental justice, feminism permeate education, even if they only go so far. So invisible education is extremely important in its own right, but it can foster change in education as well. Stewarts’ (2007) theory of ‘learning affects’ has been useful in understanding how invisible education is prompted by the feelings and questions that appear in everyday life. Max one of the Occupy activists sees bafflement and questioning as lying at the heart of intellectual enquiry and as opposed to the operation of formal education: Education is ostensibly all about eliminating your stupidity and turning it into cleverness, but if you do that then you are destroying your intellectual integrity, your creativity, and your intellectual soul, because it’s where you feel most stupid and baffled and sort of you know just kind of idiot, that’s where your real intellectual integrity is. Invisible education is a space of urgent intellectual curiosity and creativity, and we are always engaged in it through the movement of our daily entanglements in the world. Unlike education, which is composed of stratification, of removing

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what does not fit, invisible education is an amorphous sphere of wondering. It is an endless accretion of new forms of knowledge, under the banner of never finally knowing anything. The duration of invisible education

Invisible education may be composed of moments, of learning affects that happen across daily life and activities, but it is lasting in its duration. It is the everyday learning across time that makes movements like Occupy happen and means that they will happen again. Protestors are not taught that they are part of the 99%, they know it and feel it in their everyday lives. The questioning: ‘why does this feel wrong’, what is it telling me?’ generates learning affects. Their actions are consequences of invisible education about inequality. The connections invisible education produces live on through feeling and imagination; mutate into different forms, become tentacular. The invisible education in the home experienced by postverbal children and their families lives and lasts through repetitions of rituals and practices. The songs older people heard many years ago still move them and shape their sense of their own vitality and will to survive. Invisible education is enmeshed in and constitutive of a productive world of people, land, animals, machines and things. It is not an isolated fragment but is woven into and across lives. It is still there even when it seems everything else is gone. Storms will tell; they can be trusted. On the sand the wind and high tide write ( Janet Frame, 1980, from ‘Storms will Tell’) References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2015). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2016). What is the anthropo-political? In: Cohen, T., Colebrook, C., and Hillis Miller, J., eds. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 81–126. Didion, J. (2021). Let Me Tell You What I Mean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Frame, J. (1980). Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–67. Neal, S, Bennett, K., Cochrane, A. and Mohan, G. (2019). Community and conviviality? Informal social life in multicultural places. Sociology, 53(1), 69–86. DOI: 10.1177/0038038518763518 Oliver, M. (2017). Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press

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Studdert, D. and Walkerdine, V. (2016a). Being in community: Re-visioning sociology. The Sociological Review, 64, 613–21. Studdert, D. and Walkerdine, V. (2016b). Re-Thinking Community Research: Inter-relationality, Communal Being and Communality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wills, J. (2016). (Re)locating community in relationships: Questions for public policy. The Sociological Review, 64, 639–56.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic refers to Tables. Above us the Milky Way (exhibition) and Afghani women 74 academic activism 62, 68 activism 24, 29, 60, 61, 74–5, 109; and dementia 108; and Occupy movement 62–72; and symbolic objects 54–6 adult education 5–7; and critical posthumanism 12 aesthetics, everyday 3 Afghanistan 74–5, 75 Afterparties (Veasna So) 37 agentic assemblages 6, 91 Ahmed, S. 19 Alaimo, Stacy 22, 30, 31, 78, 104 alternative knowledges 25–6, 29; and activism 60, 65, 67, 80–1; and collecting/hobbies 44; and more-thanhuman world 35 Always on my mind (song) 49 animals 28, 36–42 Arendt, Hannah 98 art 9, 13; and activism 73–4, 74; and Greenham Common 55; and indigenous thinkers 25; and music 90–1; power and necessity of 47–8 art-making and postverbal people 90–1, 94–5 Auerbach, Frank 95 Ayamba, M. A. 34–5

Barad, Karen 1, 9, 32, 37, 56, 93 Barton, Polly 7 bearing witness and ethical knowledge 23–4 Beirut 72, 73–4, 74 Bennett, J. 6, 14, 31, 43, 52, 78, 97 Bennett, K. 108 Beyond Education (Meyerhof ) 6 beyond the beyond of Education 1, 10, 15; and critical posthumanism 12; and future mutabilities 21; and postverbal people 87 Beyond Words (Quinn, Blandon and Battson) 24–5, 52, 86–8, 89; and animals 40–2; and carers 96; and dementia 84, 91–2 Biesta, G. J. J. 7, 105 Bishops, Elizabeth 65 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 20, 51, 61 black people: and community cultural wealth 19–20, 25; and inequality 20; and unwritten history 34–5 Blacklock, F. 25–6 Blandon, Claudia 48 Bliss, Eula 44 Bluets (Nelson) 36 Book of Form and Emptiness (Ozeki) 52 books 85 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 72–4 Bozalek, V. 11 Braidotti, Rosi 13, 73, 97

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Campaign for Adult Education 5 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (Chast) 96 capitalism 60 carers and caring 96–8; see also older people and care homes Carson, Ann 9 Cassandra Float Can Original Cut (Carson) 9 Chast, Roz 96 children 20, 69; and art and music making 45–7 Cochrane, A. 108 Cole, Teju 23 Colebrook, Claire 107 colonialism and place/land 35 communities 8, 108–9 community building knowledge and activism 66–7 community cultural wealth 19–20, 25; and arts projects 44–5 community work 60, 75–9 Connexions career advisory service 32 counter-memory 18, 25, 32, 67 Covid-19 pandemic 5, 22; and pets 37; and social divisions 20 Crane, Hart 15 Creating our Place: Young People in Plymouth (Quinn) 53–4 critical posthumanism 11–12, 72, 106; and animals 38; and more-than-human world 29 critical race theory 19–20 cultural capital 25, 80 culture/nature binary 30 Cyborg Manifesto, A (Haraway) 42

eco-systems 36 education, formal 109–10; anachronistic 3; and humanism 99; and learning outcomes 3–4; and posthumanism 106; and social mobility 18, 19 education in nature 32–6 Ellmann, Lucy 31 employability and lifelong learning 5 End of the Story, The (Davies) 48 epistemology of the ineffable 4, 6, 42, 100 Ernaux, Annie 4–5, 44 Erpenbeck, Jenny 23, 72 ethics 18, 22–5, 26, 69 ‘Ethics’ (Cole) 23 Exmoor 34, 35, 36

daily life and learning 2–3 Davies, Lydia 48 decolonising activity 25–6 Deleuze, Gilles 50–1, 64 dementia 5, 28, 84, 88; and activism 108; and animals 40–1; and music making 42, 91–2; and uncanny things 52 devalued knowledges 7, 79–80 Didion, Joan 3–4, 106 digital technology 6, 7, 42–3, 51, 85 dogs 37, 38–9, 41–2 domestic abuse survivors and music 45–7 drama and plays 95–6 Duolingo language app 7 Durastanti, C 4 Dyer, Geoff 21–2 Dziadosz, A. 24

Hacker, Marilyn 1 Hamilton, M. 11, 51 Hampton, Leone 52 Happening (Ernaux) 4–5 Haraway, Donna 22, 30, 37, 42 Harney, S. 1, 2, 12, 25, 53, 87 Having and Being Had (Bliss) 44 Hello Dolly (song) 48–9 Hepworth, Barbara 9, 10 hidden curriculum 3 Higgins, M. 35 hoarding and uncanny objects 52 Holdsworth, C. 5 humanism 5–6, 30, 38, 73, 97, 99, 106

‘Farewell, The’ (Williams) (painting) 85 Feeling Their Way (Quinn and Blandon) 24, 45–7, 84, 89, 107 feminism 19, 61, 64–5 Fifty Sounds (Barton) 7 Foucault, Michel 25 Frame, Janet 103, 110 Frears, Ella 3 Freire, Paulo 84 Fry, Stephen 84 future mutabilities 15, 18, 21–2, 26, 80, 100, 107; and more-than-human world 28–9; and sustainability 30 Gibson, P. 25–6 Ging, D. 62 Gluck, Louise 28, 83 Greenham Common Women’s peace camp 55 Guattari, Félix 50–1, 64

identity 29, 94 If You Should Fail (Moran) 4

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imagined social capital 4, 62, 71 immaterial things 48–51, 89 In Memory of Memory (Stepanova) 43 In the Shadow of Things (Hampton) 52 Indigenous Action 24 indigenous knowledge 18, 25, 29, 35 indigenous thinkers 2, 23, 25–6; and critical posthumanism 11, 43, 54; and more-than-human world 29, 30, 37; and the uncanny 52–3 inequality and education 3; and future mutabilities 21; and government policy on social mobility 19–20 Influx and Efflux (Bennett) 14, 43 Ingold, T. 72 Iran 61–2, 74 Jack (Robinson) 91 James, Alice 31 Jamison, L. 13 jobs without training 79, 105 Jones, Shirley 31 Khademi, Kubra 75 King, James 30 Kinsky, E. 30, 43 knowledge and ways of knowing 4, 104, 105–6, 109–10; see also alternative knowledges; devalued knowledges; indigenous knowledge knowledge generation 2, 15 Kruger, Barbara 30 Kurkov, Andrey 75–6 land and place 31–6 language and humanness 83–5 Lawrence, D.H. 65 Lean Fall Stand (McGregor) 86 learning affect 8, 10, 15, 91–2, 109; and activism 67, 110; and animals 39; and material things 43 learning: formal, non-formal and informal 2, 7, 8, 10, 104–5; and children 69; and critical posthumanism 11–12; and future mutabilities 21–2; and material things 44; and nature 34; and postverbal people 99–100; and underprivileged young people 33, 80 Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Didion) 3–4 lifelong learning 5, 6–7, 60–1; and voice 84 Line in the World, A: A Year on the North Sea Coast (Nors) 29

Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed) 19 Lorde, Audre 47–8 machines 42–3 MacLure, M. 52, 106 Madden, B. 35 Mana of the Sea, The (Lawrence) 65, 78 Manning, Erin 31, 35, 91 Mansfield, Katherine 51–2 marginalised people 7, 15, 20, 100; and migrants 23–4; and posthuman ethics 22; and social justice 98; and universities 25; and unwritten history 34–5; and work/employment 79–80 Massumi, Brian 64 Matar, Hisham 21 Matta-Clark, Gordon 9 Mazzei, L. M. 86 McGregor, John 86 McKay, Ann 30 McQueen, Steve 20 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Barad) 9 memoirs as data sources 13–14, 96, 105; and material things 43–4; and migrants 24 memory 14, 106; and learning 88; see also counter-memory Metoo# 61, 62 Meyerhof, E. 6 migration and migrants 23–4 misinformation and social media 51, 62 misogyny 51, 62 Mohan, G. 108 Month in Siena, A (Matar) 21 Moran, Joe 4 more-than-human world 15, 28–9, 110; and animals 36–42; and community 108; and future mutabilities 21; and human inter-relations 31; and invisible education 32, 56; and land 31–6; and marginalised groups 22–3; and research projects with young people 32–6; and symbolic objects 55 Morrison, Toni 14 Motamedi-Fraser, Mariam 38 Moten, F. 1, 2, 12, 25, 53, 87 music making 40, 42–3, 107; and postverbal people 83, 86–94; and survivors of domestic abuse 45–7; and the uncanny 52; see also songs and singing

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Nature as a construct 30, 32 Neal, S. 108 Neimanis, Astrida 65, 66, 68, 78 Nelson, Maggie 36 neoliberalism: and adult learning 5, 60; and inequality 64 new worlds and learning 9, 10, 104, 107–8; and music 92–3 non-human world see more-than-human world Nors, Dorthe 29 Not a Novel (Erpenbeck) 72 object making 53–4 Obladi Oblada (song) 49 Occupy movement 54, 55, 56, 62–72 Ofsted 88 older people and care homes 2, 28, 92, 105; and singing 43, 48, 85, 89 Olds, Sharon 47 Oliver, Mary 104 ontology and posthumanism 22, 30, 53, 104 oppression and inequality 2, 20 Ordinary Affects (Stewart) 8, 90 Out of the Clear (Manning) 35 outdoor education 32–6 Ozeki, Ruth 52 Pederson, H. 37 peer learning and social media 62 Plath, Sylvia 65 Plymouth area volunteering 77–8 Plymouth Music Zone (PMZ) 40, 45, 46, 48, 84, 86, 107 poetry 65, 78, 103–4 political power structures 5, 20; and social mobility 18, 79–80; and volunteering 76 poor, deserving and undeserving 19 popular culture 2, 51, 61 Portable Magic (Smith) 85 postcolonialism 3, 65 posthumanism 2–3, 6; and activism 63–5; and animals 37; and ethics and rights 18, 22–5, 26; and machines 42; and new materialism 30; and object making as a methodology 53; pragmatic 13; and song 50–1; and the uncanny 52–3; see also critical posthumanism postqualitative approaches and work 13–14 postverbal people 2, 13, 83, 86–8, 99–100, 110; and agency 93; and art-making 94–5; and more-than-human world 28;

and music making 40, 86–94; and rights 24–5; and their carers 96–8 Power of Songs, The (Quinn and Blandon) 48, 78, 85–6, 89 privilege and social mobility 19–20 racism 19–20, 35, 51, 61 Radical Landscapes (exhibition) 55 Rancière, Jacques 83–4, 94 refugees 23–4 regime of truth and social mobility 18–20, 26 Renold, E. 37–8, 52 rights 18, 22–3, 24 Ringrose, J. 37–8 Robinson, Marilynne 91 royalty and counter-memory 25 Saito, Y. 3 sculpture and new worlds 9 sea and coastal areas 103–4; and volunteering 77–9 sekretiki (little secrets) (Russian game) 43 self and subjectivity 4 Siapera, E. 62 Significance and Survival of Tent City University, The (Quinn) 54, 62 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) 14 Small Axe (TV series) 20 Smith, Emma 85 social media and activism 61–2 social mobility 18–21, 26, 80; and formal education 3, 100; and future mutabilities 15, 22; and underprivileged young people 34 Social Mobility Commission and Tsar 19 Songlines the Seven Sisters (exhibition) 25 songs and singing 48–51, 85, 89, 110 Springay, S. 31 Stepanova, M. 43 Stewart, Kathleen 1, 8, 39, 90 strangers, fictional people and their influence 4–5 Strangers I Know / La Straniera (Durastanti) 4 stroke survivors 86, 90–1 students and volunteering 76–7 surging knowledges 12 symbolic things 53–6 TallBear, K. 29, 37, 53 Tamboukou, M. 12

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Tent City University 54–5, 54, 63, 67, 68; and academia 69, 70; and imagined social capital 71 Tett, L. 51 things and invisible education 43–8, 97–8; see also symbolic things; uncanny things Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) 64 time and song 50–1 Todd, Zoe 11, 23, 29, 30, 53 toxic bodies 22, 23 trails and waves in activism 64–5 trees and sentience 31 Tuck, Eve 31, 53 Ukraine and ‘toloka’ (community work) 75–6 Ullmann, Linn 14 uncanny things 51–3 Undercommons, The: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Harney and Moten) 1, 2, 12 underprivileged young people 34, 100; and animals 38–40; and work/employment 79–80 unemployment and social mobility 34 universities 69; and marginalised groups 25; and social mobility 20–1, 23; see also Tent City University

Unquiet (Ullmann) 14 unself, the 4, 105 Vanderbilt, T. 5 Veasna So, Anthony 37 Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 6 voice and language 84–5; and humanness 86; and music making 89; and postverbal people 99–100 volunteering 60, 75–9 Vonnegut, Kurt 14 white privilege 19–20, 34 Williams, Evelyn 85 witches 52 women: and domestic abuse 2, 24, 45–6, 89; and outdoor education 33–4; and patriarchy 31; and symbolic objects 55; violence against 51, 61–2, 72–4, 75; see also feminism Women for Women International 72–3, 73 women’s refuge and music 45–7 Wordsworth, Dorothy 31 Years, The (Ernaux) 44 Yosso, T. J. 25 Zembylas, M. 11