A “rejoinder” to a response-able reviewing of A posthumanist re-reading of teacher agency in times of curriculum reform

Abstract

How would we define a rejoinder (article)? The usual expectations are responses (termed as often “angry” by the Cambridge Dictionary) that would react critically to questions pertaining to a scholar’s expertise or involving a defensive reaction. But for the purpose of this intra-active dialogical becoming, I will focus my attention on the rich dialogical writing and reviewing approach that brought me to this rejoinder article, fully acknowledging the fluidity and complexity of academic landscapes that are always in becoming. I appreciate the reviewer(s) and editor(s) proposal of this affirmative response-able writing and reviewing process that presents an acknowledgment that a theory/problematic in becoming (such as posthumanism in education) comprises an experimentation. Instead of adopting attack-and-defend binary reactions (where reviewers attack and writers defend or vice versa), what we should be questioning is what can we learn from a critical response-able reading of such experimentations. The initial article, the response article, and this “rejoinder” are in fact engaging with a question posed by Bozalek, Zembylas, and Shefer (2019, 351) – “How ... can peer reviewing be shaped to encourage the academic writer and support scholarly development of their arguments?” Let us firstly acknowledge that Posthumanism can be defined in various ways and is not limited to a fixed interpretation and is currently in flux, as scholars move from humanist foci to a posthumanist epistemological and ontological turn. In such a climate of change, this exercise of response-able writing and reviewing has allowed the voices of both the writer (who traditionally responds/adheres to the authority of reviewers and editors) and reviewers (whose rich and critical engagements are most of the time anonymised) to intra-act