For a while I have been engaging with the question: what can objects do? (Taylor, 2013; Taylor 2017) from a posthumanist/new material feminist approach. I take this interest forward in this paper by considering what a posthumanist/new material feminist/ transdisciplinary theoretical approach offers in helping to unpick the Humanist presumptions which usually consign objects to the ‘background’ and which ensure that object lives go unnoticed and ignored by humans obsessed by their own busyness. The stance I take up entails questioning the work that goes on to ‘keep’ objects in their objectified state so that ‘we’ (humans) can continue to be the subjects who subject objects to our needs: the hammer may be to hand (see Heidegger) but it is the hand that matters (Bennett, 2010). What if we encountered objects in higher education otherwise? Where would we get to if we refused that kingly-sovereign disposition which renders objects (like space) inert, dull and dead? What might a ‘pedagogy of objects’ entail and what new matterings might object pedagogies produce? I take these questions up to consider how material feminist thinking (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016) might be generative of a relational ecological ethics in which the pedagogic role of objects helps us imagine, think and do higher education differently. According to Wilson (2016), ‘encounters’ have historically been theorized as a ‘genre of contact’ with that which is ‘other’. In such an understanding, encounters both produce borders and are conditioned by borders. How might object pedagogies help us contest, transgress, and negotiate with/around/beyond such human-instituted borders? Entangled human-object encounters are woven into our lives as higher education academics but the pedagogic work they do has received little attention as yet. In addition, higher education institutional objects work do important pedagogic work in the public realm (see the Rhodes Must Fall actions and debates, for example). I argue that thinking with object pedagogies as human-nonhuman encounters via material feminist theory keeps pedagogy, curricula and research on the move. I consider how object pedagogies destabilise fixed identities; make separation an instance of realisation of precarious existence (Tsing, 2015); and how they might work to dis-place the ableism and racism of the Humanist, colonising imaginary (Goodley et al, 2014: 2). Through this my central argument is that object pedagogies and the work of encounter they produce brings to the fore possibilities for changing dominant educational narratives.

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