Introduction

This essay imagines how a pedagogy of resistance could be guided by a critical posthumanist orientation. Situated in a South African university of technology, I investigate the twin manifestations of power – potestas and potentia (restrictive and productive power respectively) – contained in a geomatics learning experience that affect the subjectification of students and educators alike. An immanent Deleuzian stance conceives of life as a process of creative power, and this helps me to explore the creative potential of storytelling as a micro-instance of pedagogical activism.

Geomatics is an umbrella term, and includes the disciplines of cartography, land surveying, geographic information systems (GIS), photogrammetry, geodesy and remote sensing. Current South African geomatics education is an extension of the old surveying education which was developed during the colonial and apartheid eras. The curriculum is overtly technicist and subtly politically loaded in a way that entrenches certain discourses and promotes specific subjectivities. Is apartheid fascism still haunting the geomatics curriculum? More than two decades after the official ending of apartheid, how would South African engineering curricula fare when asked if black lives matter?

Geomatics has been at the forefront of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, so I am not arguing for transdisciplinarity in itself. Rather, I am promoting a type of transdisciplinary pedagogy that transcends the border between ethics and technology, between art and science. It seeks to find interconnections between the discursive communities of the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. It is experimental, seeking out smooth pedagogical space among a sedimented and striated (TP) engineering curriculum that favours quantitative logic and promotes a normativity and worldview which is largely capitalist.

Cartography

For Braidotti, posthumanism is a navigational tool to map a set of material and discursive conditions, and this mapping is done by means of a cartography. This type of cartography accounts for subjects’ location in space and time, and provides alternative representations in terms of potestas and potentia (Braidotti 2002). The cartography can be supplemented methodologically by reading together selected theorists (such as Deleuze, Braidotti, Barad, Haraway and Plumwood) with non-representational theory, and the critical cartographic insights of J. B. Harley. A cartographic analysis pays attention to ‘micropolitical instances of activism, avoiding overarching generalizations’ (Braidotti 2011: 269).