Tara Fenwicka* and Paolo Landrib aSchool of Education University of Stirling, Stirling, UK; bCNR-IRPPS (Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali), Italy

Research in learning and pedagogy has for some time been turning away from preoccupation with individual learners, teachers or minds to embrace the situatedness of these processes and their many interrelations. Some researchers have explored socio-cultural or activity conceptions, some spatiality approaches, some ‘practice-based’conceptions of learning, and some even draw from complexity science. 1 All of these have sought to decentre a longterm educational focus on the individual human subject. They also eschew the domination in education of representationalist conceptions of knowledge, and explore ways that learning and knowing are rooted in action–including the ongoing action that brings forth the objects and identities constituting our worlds. At the same time they attempt to move beyond overly simplistic notions of ‘participation’and ‘community of practice’that have been so widely critiqued (inter alia Hughes, Jewson, and Unwin 2007). This issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society joins this developing tradition, but with a special interest in foregrounding the materiality of educational processes. The problem with educational views that are overly preoccupied with developing a particular kind of human subject is that materials–including human material–become invisible or subordinate to human cognition and agency. In this issue we challenge this hierarchy theoretically and empirically, and foreground the ‘matter’of education as the mutual entailment of human and non-human energies in local materialisations of education and learning.