The planetary is a concept Spivak has worked and reworked, with her initial discussion of the planetary presented as a lecture on migration in Switzerland in 1997 as Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet. She expanded and developed her notions of the planetary and planetarity in numerous contexts, including her Death of the Discipline study of comparative literature written in 2003, where she takes a more psychoanalytic approach to the notion of planetarity. 14 She subsequently extends this concept in multiple places, including in a planetarity contribution to the Welt (or World) entry in the Dictionary of Untranslatables. 15 This is a concept that Spivak has written and rewritten, forged and revised. It is in her earlier 1997 discussion though that she draws attention to the planetary as a way of figuring the subject and “collective responsibility.” 16 Wynter, S. (1994). But what does wonder do? Meanings, canons, too? On literary texts, cultural contexts, and what it’s like to be one/not one of us. Stanford Humanities Review, 4(1), 124–129. Public Health England. 2020. Deaths of people identified as having learning disabilities with COVID-19 in England in the spring of 2020. Accessed 12th November 2020 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-deaths-of-people-with-learning-disabilities.

Hodge, S., Holford, J., Milana, M., Waller, R., & Webb, S. (2021). Who is “competent” to shape lifelong education’s future? International Journal of Lifelong Education, 40(3), 193–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2021.1976566 Bogdan, R., and S. Taylor. 1976. The judged, not the judges: An insider’s view of mental retardation. American Psychologist 31 (1): 47–52. What other generative problems might we create? Philosophies are material practices. How to intervene in neoliberal world-making embedded in the material practices of contemporary academic study and inquiry? Active resistance to whiteness, modernity and bibliographical narrowness is a start. Life and learning touch everything, all at once. We can look for inspiration in Wynter’s radical, diffractive, expansive reading and storytelling across genres, theories, histories, poetics, asking not how things can be made to fit together but how to create something new with interdisciplinarity and difference. Shilliam, Robbie (2019) Sylvia Wynter – “A Dream Deferred: Will the Condemned Rasta Fari ever Return to Africa?” Annotated duplication of an article by Wynter in the British National Archives. Snaza, N., & Mishra Tarc, A. (2019). “To wake up our minds”: The re-enchantment of praxis in Sylvia Wynter. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1552418

Sylvia Wynter's scholarly work is highly poetic, expository, and complex. Her work attempts to elucidate the development and maintenance of colonial modernity and the modern man. She interweaves science, philosophy, literary theory, and critical race theory to explain how the European man came to be considered the epitome of humanity, "Man 2" or "the figure of man". Wynter's theoretical framework has changed and deepened over the years. Goodley, D., and A. Ktenidis. 2023. Depathologising the curriculum. Sheffield: iHuman. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/our-work/marginalised-humans/depathologising-curriculum. Accessed 15th May 2023. Third, is an emphasis on communalism ‘understood principally as a way of living, of co-existing and working with others. It requires conscious efforts to function in ways that build communities and communal practices instead of perpetuating esoteric individualism that breaks human bonds’ (Zondi 2022, p. 239). My brief insight into the work of People with Learning Disabilities captures a particular kind of communalism that contrasts markedly with disposability, absolute otherness and neoliberal-ableist exceptionalism. I make this provocation fully aware of the narrow confines assigned to the category of being human in our current times. According to Wynter ( 2003) this category is the Western bourgeois conception of the human—Man—that over-represents itself as if it were the human per se; as ‘the ostensibly only normal human’ (Wynter 2003, p. 265). In accounting for this over-representation as man-as-human, Wynter ( 2003) presents us with social and historical tracings of the emergence of what she terms Man1 (renaissance man, homo politicus) and Man2 (late Nineteenth Century liberal mono-humanist evolutionary man; homo oeconomicus). At the very moment that Columbus sets foot on Footnote 6 Turtle Island in 1492 the concepts of man and human became one and the same (Mignolo 2015). Homo politicus is akin to Foucault’s sovereign self embodied by the rational political subject of the civilised European male. This is the coloniser with an already over-represented opinion of himself as normally human. By the late Nineteenth Century, the scientific subject—homo oeconomicus—is born; biologically and evolutionary developed, innately pristine and phylogenetically selected to survive and flourish. In collapsing man-human-normal, this constitution of humanness resonates with the phenomenon of the normate (Garland-Thomson 2012; Titchkosky 2022). The figure of the normate dominates humanist conceptions of man/human in modern Western European secular societies—personified by Leonardo da Vinci’s image of Vitruvian Man—and detectable in the most contemporary representations of popular culture. Footnote 7 Mpofu and Steyn ( 2021, p. 1) assert that the ‘grand construction of the human of Euro-modernity was founded on unhappy circumstances and for tragic purposes. That which was categorised as non-human became things, reduced to resources, usable and disposable by the unapologetic humans ’. Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles". World Literature Today 63 (Autumn 1989): 637–647.

With the added challenge of social distancing rules for performers within the performance area, there was no longer the possibility of realising the original idea of melding vocal artist, musicians and dancers through the space. However, resulting from the creative process, I felt the restrictions on space and distance imposed between each artist became a further comment on our continual attempt at getting closer and an ever shifting balance in our relationship with others. Dam Van Huynh It is rare in contemporary times to encounter international education policy reports that envision personal fulfilment, international solidarity, a sense of wonderment for what it means to be in the world, such as we encounter in the 1972 report of the International Commission on the Development of Education, chaired by Edgar Faure. Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, also known as the 1972 Faure report, was commissioned and published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the advent of the Second Development Decade (1970–1980). The Faure report, like many educational policy ventures, was seized with a sense of urgency at a time of “unprecedented demand for education” (Faure et al. 1972, p. vi), its goals no less than the generation of “over-all solutions to the major problems involved in the development of education in a changing universe” (ibid., p. v). “[ F] or the first time in history”, the authors announced, “ education is now engaged in preparing men for a type of society which does not yet exist” (ibid., p. 13; italics in original). It's so easy to stay where you are, it's quite exhausting fighting with the benefits system with fears about losing benefits, because of 'fitness to work' assessments that make no sense, or sorting out what support you're entitled to from social services. So why would you jeopardize all that by getting a job that pays real money? Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations". Interview. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke, 2014. 9–89. Césaire, A. (2000 [1955]). Discourse on colonialism. Transl. J. Pinkham. New York: NYU Press/Monthly Review Press.Goodley, D. 2007. Towards socially just pedagogies: Deleuzoguattarian critical disability studies. International Journal of Inclusive Education 11 (3): 317–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603110701238769. Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and 'Fables That Stir the Mind': To Reinvent the Study of Letters". Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding and Textuality. Ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries. Louisiana State UP, 1997. 141–163. Barod started by making information from public bodies accessible to People with Learning Disabilities. It still does that, setting up Planet Easy Read, so more people can get involved and earn some money. a b Scott, David (September 2000). "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter". Small Axe (8): 119 - 207. Chappell, A.L., D. Goodley, and R. Lawthom. 2001. Making connections: The relevance of the social model of disability for people with learning difficulties. British Journal of Learning Disabilities 29 (2): 45–50.

Mbembe, A. (2021). Futures of life and futures of reason. Public Culture, 33(1), 11–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742136 Second, is the requirement for a mutual recognition of the humanity of others (see also Cornell and Van Marle 2015). This entails ‘being and doing human as a process of restoring, enriching and reinforcing the humanity of others, through our speech, the ways we relate to others, and the design of human systems’ (Zondi 2022, p. 238). The aims, objectives, language and sentiments of Barod, Speakup, Sunderland People First and Sheffield Voices described above capture in detail some of the ways in which People with Learning Disabilities engage in human being as praxis to offer design, support and mutuality. There is a point where you just have to go for it. You have to have faith in yourself and faith in those around you. At once philosophical, “of a practical nature” and aiming “to lead to action” (Faure et al. 1972, p. vii), the report set out to offer governments, scholars and educational actors of many kinds evocative concepts with which to prepare for this society-to-come, including lifelong education (and later, lifelong learning), the learning society, international solidarity and personalised learning (Elfert 2018; Faure et al. 1972). The authors of the Faure report subverted views prevailing at the time that education should be rationed for the elite, and that the nature of knowledge was that of a static corpus, to be consumed “once and for all” early in life (ibid., p. 160). The authors of the Faure report envisioned instead a new mode of continuous, “dialectical thought” (ibid., p. 148) “reaching out to embrace the whole of society and the entire lifespan of the individual” (ibid., pp. 161), fit for the ever-changing knowledge of the scientific age and empowered by endlessly innovative technologies and the efficiencies they promised: a commitment to evidence and reason over dogma; to science over myth, to concrete realities and experience over standardised testing regimes abstracted from everyday life. The report’s authors even imagined “ dialogue between man and machine” (ibid., p. 143; italics in original), datafied educational subjects, and a computer-enhanced intellectual revolution that would “ fre[e] the human mind” from routine cognitive labour (ibid., p. 126; italics in original).

Wynter, Sylvia (1992). Do Not Call Us Negros: How "Multicultural" Textbooks Perpetuate Racism. Aspire. ISBN 9780935419061.