The AcademicAssessmentMachine: Posthuman Possibilities of/for Doing Assignments and Assessments Differently

Abstract

This article brings a posthuman approach to assignments and assessments as they are configured in and by normative practices in educational institutions, including schools and universities. Composed as a collaborative posthuman autoethnography, we use the figuration of the AcademicAssessmentMachine to illuminate how educational assessment-as-usual positions, hierarchizes, grades, and disposes human bodies—both teachers and students—in ways that are affectively damaging and socially unjust. In rethinking educational assignments and assessment as a more-than-human affair, we swerve its purpose and doings toward more affirmative possibilities. We ask how might we disrupt the AcademicAssessmentMachine while being caught within it ourselves?