PH Praxis
This website is a cybernetic extension of two human researchers: Sarah Shelton and Miriam Rowntree. The function of this extension is to be a repository for posthuman praxis, both its theory and its implementation. Contributors vary from social media agents to other human researchers to the classrooms, desks, and blackboards that shape such pedagogical research. In engaging with various media, we (the humans and the technology) provide a platform for teaching narratives to shift and for posthuman praxis to become a more integral part of our pedagogical identities.
Pedagogical Stories
Sarah Shelton teaches both composition and literature at the University of Texas at Arlington. Long ago, in a district not so far away, she also taught high school English, joining a long and storied family tradition in public education. Her research with posthumanist pedagogy and educational research focuses on the materiality of reading, writing, and the classroom and uses what she calls “teaching elsewhere” to daily, locally, and doggedly resist/rewrite/recalibrate the humanist narratives of nowhere and anywhere written into our policies and classrooms. As a full-time adjunct, she feels the pressures of those narratives more than ever.
Miriam Rowntree teaches Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Tyler. She loves her students and her job. This is the first academic environment she has participated in where the teaching narrative does not include copious amounts of complaining. Her research focuses on the apocalyptic potential of posthuman pedagogy and currently works toward articulating a hopeful future for academia. She also circulates herself among ruins, metaphorical and physical, in contemplation of what waste and ruin teach us about cycles, entropy, and always beginning again.
But here we are, still insisting on a different story.
PH Praxis 