Reframing STEAM by Posthumanizing Transdisciplinary Education: Towards an Understanding of How Sciences and Arts Meet and Matter for Sustainable Futures

Too often, STEAM education remains confined to singular understandings of arts-infused science teaching. Much less understood, developed and drawn upon are alternative epistemologies and material-discursive practices in education that decentralize the human from knowledge production, and acknowledge transdisciplinary intersections across the different areas of scientific and artistic ways of knowing and being in the natural world. This paper draws upon the effort of a group of international scholars who came together in a recent book, Why science and art creativities matter, edited by the authors of this article and featured in the recent ICAS conference. Contributors drew upon a wide range of backgrounds - anthropology, humanities, philosophy, visual and performing arts, sciences and education - to discuss and redefine the theoretical basis of STEAM in the context of a future-making education.Many of these scholars make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that have important pedagogical consequences. Through a form of collective, diffractive reading of educational settings and data, this paper explore ways of mapping transdisciplinarity through space and time and creating collaborative cartographies that are not merely representational. Collectively, the juxtaposition and continuous diffractive exchange of theoretical stances and framings helps to not only surface the structures and cultures that often go uninterrogated, but also for rethinking STEAM as transdisciplinary education; a future-making understanding of how sciences and arts meet and come to matter for sustainable futures.