In universities worldwide, there has been a movement away from mono-disciplinary towards multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary education, motivated by the notion that complex societal issues call for more than a single disciplinary perspective. To prepare students for a role in addressing these issues, flexibility within educational programs is needed for students to move within, across and beyond disciplines. Contrary to the intended orientation on societal issues, multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary education appear in the current discourse regularly as aims in themselves, as if they were distinctive types of education that one should adopt at the level of a course or a program. We argue that education could more flexibly utilize and create free space: continuously questioning, also together with students, what sorts of perspectives and disciplinarities problems require. Therefore, we propose boundary crossing as an alternative way of thinking about multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary education. At many universities, organizing for flexibility already gains some traction. However, we believe that a shift of focus towards more open ways of transgressing disciplines in the field of higher education is vital for furthering the transformative potential of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity for students to being and becoming the professionals that society needs.

This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer’s “Form und Technik” ( 1930 ) and Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques ( 1958 ). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the “being” of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity,” that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer’s and Simondon’s insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of “nature” and “the human,” which are now understood as coevolving with technology.

This article discusses microaggressions as new political material for feminist scholars and activists. The article asks how the new materialisms may contribute to the conceptualisation and operationalisation of microaggressions. After all, and taking them at face value, the ontological status of microaggressions and their modes of operation are fascinating: what are these allegedly infinitesimal hostilities? How do they reach their target and, once they have arrived there, how do they take effect? What assumptions about the constituents of the world do scholars and activists make when, through language they imply that microaggressions are indeed ‘out there’ and therefore researchable? Case studies around micropsychological dynamics that have come to my attention through National Public Radio’s podcast Invisibilia as well as the French philosophical work of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) will help to unfold my argument. Invisibilia is here taken to be an instance of new materialist popular culture, and whilst Ravaissonian philosophy has influenced the philosophical work of Bergson, the work of both men contributes to the continental philosophical impetus of the new materialisms.