This Special Issue asks what can be done in terrains of education and educational research beyond the fantasy of human control. This question presents a repertoire of complex issues. Many of us, ourselves as guest editors included, will not quite know how to let go of our familiar ‘humanist’ concepts, approaches, ontologies, and thoughts, most of which carry the epistemological promise that the world is accessible for us as researchers and possible to understand and conceptualize as a source of endless scientific knowledge production and accumulation: a form of knowledge incrementalism (see Lather & St. Pierre, 2013. As Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre reminds us in her Introduction to this issue, just think about how we as teachers ask our students to identify a ‘gap in knowledge’ in previous research that their thesis is supposed to address).