Invisible Education 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.
This book challenges the feelgood fiction of social mobility through formal education, replacing it with the new concept of future mutabilities, shaped through lifelong learning and critical posthumanism. By drawing on a wide range of empirical research it explores landscapes, animals, machines, and things- material, immaterial, uncanny, and symbolic-, 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. In developing this, the book provides a critical and theoretical exploration of invisible education and its importance in the context of critical posthumanism.
Invisible Education is innovative in drawing on original research studies and making links across them and in drawing on other forms of text such as memoir, autobiography, poetry, and essays. It will show how forms of writing which explore forms of living but destabilise linearity, rationality and subjectivity are congruent with and helpful to PQPHMF work in troubling assumptions about what is significant or meaningful. It will appeal to scholars in education and other arts, humanities and social science disciplines, and those interested in critical posthumanist research.
About the Author: 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 joint co-ordinator of the Adventures in Posthumanism international network.
