the conceptual approach of this study is not a traditional comparative one. I took the opposing positioning of the UK and Germany as a starting point, understanding that, at this point in time, any development including new or converging technologies is to ultimately play out on a global level.
[19] 1.1.2 Embedding the Research in Pedagogy
“Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy is Made by Walking”
(McLaren and Jandric 2014: 805).
“When we discussed it at our table, it
wasn't for the world to debate”
(Nash, Lisa quoted in Hendrickson,
Molly. 2017: online source).
The first opening quotation to this section by Professor of Education and Critical Studies, Peter McLaren, and Professor of Informatics, Petar Jandric, bases the making of critical pedagogy on walking. In a future chapter, I will return to walking when emphasizing that “discourse,” in its etymology, means walking (back and forth). In this sense, McLaren and Jandric’s statement describes the development of a discourse of a critical pedagogy as never coming to a standstill but being, at the core of it, based on the ability to create and interrupt meaning and to move back and forth between streams of thoughts, conditions, people, forms of enquiry and so on. Thus, within the framework of critical pedagogy, pedagogy is an on-going active process in scholarship and practice that is sensitive towards examining how education (re-)generates both inequality and injustice, as powers are acting intersectionally (Beck 2005). The following section provides a brief insight into scholarly cornerstones I passed when dis-coursing towards the PhD study this book is based on.
More often than not people I spoke to during the years of this study asked in which discipline I would defend the PhD study. This had also been the case as my “home discipline,” pedagogy, does not exist or is understood very differently in the countries where I shared most collegial conversations during the years of this study. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the study and understanding that it is written in the years during which the term “postdisciplinarity” was becoming popular and powerful, I regularly responded to questions by explaining how my study was informed and deeply rooted within my training as a social worker and in pedagogy. Given that I received my diploma in pedagogy from the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, I was exposed to a fair degree to the work of the Frankfurt School as part of my pedagogical studies. One of the main thoughts I “inherited” from my studies in Frankfurt am Main was that “social inquiry ought to combine rather than separate the poles of philosophy and the social sciences” (Bohman 2005). Max Horkheimer described “human emancipation” as the main goal of work within the interface of philosophy and the social sciences (ibid). Thus, within my theoretical training as a pedagogue the importance and interdependence of philosophy and pedagogy was emphasized.
[20] It was also during my time in Frankfurt am Main that theoretical notions of the Leib re-entered my work, and I understood that “Die Leiblichkeit bildet die Grundlage allen pädagogischen Handelns”6 (Liebau 2013). If so, then understanding Leiblichkeit is the pre-requisite to professional pedagogical agency. However, understanding Leiblichkeit and Leibsein7 (in its entirety) is not possible without an embodied engagement and a sensory exposure, which in turn creates the bases of pedagogical agency. This study, although focusing in on RGTs and biomedical developments, offers a topical entry point to studying Leiblichkeit and to engaging with it in an embodied manner. Additionally, it communicates with numerous studies published in pedagogy that examine influences of RGTs on motherhood, childhood and identity (Colpin 2002, Funcke and Thorn 2010, Malek 2006, Freeman and Golombok 2012, Golombok et al. 1996).
While studying in Frankfurt am Main, I worked full-time as a social worker with trauma-experienced persons, mainly women who had experienced sexual and/or domestic violence and/or displacement. This work informed, from a practice-based background, my interest in the Leib and in aesthetic education as it focuses on the Leib and on “leibsinnliches Erleben und Erfahren”8 (Mattenklott 2013: online source). My interest in notions of Leib, became important in my daily work as a social worker, and more so due to the inclusion of aesthetic education in my work. At the same time, triggered by both my studies and my pedagogical practice, I became more interested in the question of who we are to and with each other. What is a human being to another human being? What shapes our relatedness, our interdependent existence and at the same time, hierarchies as they play out among humans? Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg Eckart Liebau underlines: “Menschen leben in Beziehungen; sie können gar nicht anders”9 (Liebau 2013: online source). Two crucial components of my practical and theoretical work in pedagogy thus have been and continue to be: 1. an educational approach inclusive of Leib, as it presents itself in aesthetic education and, 2. the understanding that humans are at any given point in time Mitmenschen; a term that I will leave in this text as a “stranger,” as translation scholar Carolyn Shread puts it (Shread 2016: presentation). After years of trying to translate it, I’ve come to the understanding that I cannot find a translation that transports all of its nuanced meanings. If I have to translate it in conversations, I use the term “with-human” to underline the inescapability of with/mit as human condition.
[21] In my understanding, offering an entry point to studying Leiblichkeit and contemporary challenges to how we are Mitmenschen to each other is fundamentally pedagogical. It provides a terminology with which to discuss how biomedical developments enter the private space of the family. An example is savior siblings, genetically “designed” to save a sibling’s life, raising deeply pedagogical questions such as: Is having a savior sibling using the child exclusively as a means to an end? How do such novel social and hierarchical family structures impact the development of both children, their identity and relationship with each other? And finally, is there no longer a family table? To phrase the last question differently: are decisions about having or not having children (and the why behind those decisions) no (longer) intimate and ultimately private for families to make at their families’ tables?
The second opening quotation to this section is from Lisa Nash, the mother of Adam Nash, who in 2001 was born in the US as the first known savior child to benefit his sister Molly. When I read the interview with Adam Nash’s parents, I was struck by Lisa Nash’s idea that discussing planning to have a savior sibling child could possibly be a discussion she and her husband could own in so far as that it only would regard their private sphere, in the sense of not leaving the family’s table. While not dealing with savior siblings in this study, in analyzing RGTs and biomedical developments, as well as new injustices and the global nature of biomedical practices, this study provides a vocabulary and background knowledge to discuss questions arising from, as Maura Dickey puts it, “having a child for their spare parts.” (Dickey 2015: online source) It furthermore points to the fact that even if Pre-Implantation Diagnostic (in the literature referred to PGD or PID or PIGD)10 and related medical procedures involved in the “creation” of a savior sibling to be born are currently not legal in three European countries, including Germany, this could result in a couple traveling to another country to undergo procedure, as done by the English couple Katie and Andy Matthews, who went to the US to undergo PID procedures resulting in the birth of their son Max in 2003, who acted as a savior sibling for his sister Megan (Walsh 2010: online source).
If we are going to treat children as if they are merely made of harvestable parts, then we should also establish legal standards that provide an independent advocate for the savior sibling. It is uncommon for such a polarizing practice to be left unaddressed, particularly in the realm of protecting or exploiting human dignity. The rapidly evolving arena of bioethics is a force to be reckoned with, threatening to dismantle the traditional view that the parent knows best. But to frame the conditions for such an ethically questionable practice is far better than simply continuing to stand by and do nothing. (Dickey 2015: online source)
[22] To address pedagogical questions that arise from developments in RGTs and biomedicine and are related to identity, family dynamics, parenthood and so on, I did find it crucial to investigate the “space between” disciplinary voices, vocabularies, and research among the following disciplines. The following list emphasizes pedagogy,