Publisher Description

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Invisible Education 2. Social Mobility and Future Mutabilities 3. Invisible Others: Land, Animals, Machines and Things 4. Invisible Knowledges: Activism, Volunteering and Work 5. Invisible Beings: Postverbal People and the Invisible Education of Care 6. Invisible Communities: The Contributions of Invisible Education 7. Index

Review

"This is an utterly compelling book that left me mesmerised by its poetic tone, that I have only felt when reading literature. Combined with a fresh and original conceptual rigour, the central notion of the book, 'invisible education' unfolds effortlessly through the author's elegant deployment of what she configures as 'the epistemology of the ineffable'. Drawing on a critical post-humanist perspective that highlights our immanent relationality with the world, the book thus joins the 'invisible chain' of real people, fictional characters, ineffable discourses, as well as aesthetic objects of the everyday that keep educating us invisibly and yet deeply and forcefully, without imposing any restrictions within the unbearable heaviness of formal education." Maria Tamboukou, Professor of Feminist Studies and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, University of East London, UK

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