This paper begins with the question posed by Frankham (2009): how can we think about learning in a heterogeneous way? It answers this question by first considering the ‘ontological turn’ in higher education (Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007) which seeks to resist the commoditisation and instrumentalisation of knowledge which has been such a pervasive feature of recent neoliberal discourses. It notes that, while neoliberalism privileges the acquisition of skills and the transmission of knowledge, the ontological turn shifts the focus back to the potentially transformative power of learning, and opens a way to rethink the ‘commitment, openness, wonder [and] passion’ of learning (Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2007: 681). The main part of the paper pursues heterogeneous thinking about learning and ontology by way of theories drawn from material feminism and object-oriented ontology. It briefly outlines the practice of ‘diffractive musing’ (Taylor, 2015) as a means to read insights ‘through one another’ (Barad, 2007: 25) in order to ‘attend to … details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’. The paper goes on to engage Barad’s (2007) concept of ethico-onto-epistemology to argue against the separation of the mind and body and proposes, instead, a form of knowing-in-being. The argument here is that a conception of learning which foregrounds the materiality of embodied and emplaced sensory knowing enables us to ask new and different questions about how our knowledge-making practices are entangled with our ethical responsibilities. The final part of the paper turns to Harman's (2011) object-oriented ontology to outline what an ontology that decentres humans by putting objects on the same ontological plane as us has to offer in any reconceptualisation of learning. The paper ends by considering how these new ontologies both speak to, and contest, the humanist tradition of bildung. As such, it offers a wondering without confirmation.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Half Way – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Dall’Alba, G. and Barnacle. R. (2007). An ontological turn for higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 32:6, 679-691. Frankham, J. (2009) Editorial. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 17:1, 1-3. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Alresford, Hants: Zero Books. Taylor, C. A. (2015, forthcoming). Close Encounters of a Critical Kind: A Diffractive Musing In/Between Material Feminism and Speculative Realism, Cultural Studies-Critical