Invisible Education

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.