Dirty Ontology of Education

Posthumanist, new materialist, and actor–network approaches increasingly draw attention to heterogeneous configurations of humans, technologies, infrastructures, and environments in which educational practices take place. At the same time, philosophical traditions of education insist that education cannot be reduced to relational complexity, since it requires normative distinctions that allow us to recognise education as education. These lines of thought are often treated as incompatible. This article argues that this tension points to a deeper feature of educational reality. I propose the concept of the dirty ontology of education to describe the condition in which pedagogical practices must reduce the complexity of the world to make education visible, while educational actions mobilise, stabilise, and transform relations that exceed these pedagogical reductions. Educational events are thus never pure: they become possible only through the ordering of heterogeneous relations, and this ordering can never be complete. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s analysis of dirt and Bruno Latour’s account of purification and hybridity, the paper shows how pedagogical strategies of ordering inevitably generate forms of excess that destabilise the boundaries through which education is defined. Rather than locating this “dirt” outside pedagogy, the article understands it as an internal feature of educational practice. Recognising the dirty ontology of education allows philosophy of education to move beyond the opposition between pedagogies of meaning and relational ontologies, and to develop a more adequate account of education as a practice that simultaneously orders and transforms the world.