pedagogy at the end of the world: weird pedagogies for unthought educational futures

// PhD dissertation research; Defended November 2021; Supervising Committee: Jason Wallin, jan jagodzinski, Natalie Loveless; Readers: Claire Colebrook, Patricia MacCormack //

This study of Pedagogy at the End of the World investigates the “end of the world” scenarios that now characterize education and its reasons in Anthropocene times. Emerging through an interrogation of the apocalypse habits and anthropo-scenic views through which educational futurity is most often imagined, this study is oriented towards the creation of pedagogical concepts that work to problematize and resituate questions of educational futurity in relation to the planetary realities raised by today’s pressing extinction events. The book unfolds through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity, each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical un/thinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on alternative orientations to educational futurity.

Specifically, the trajectories of educational futurity explored within are linked to the problems of sustainable futures, energy futures and working futures. Importantly, each of these speculative studies endeavours to move beyond just analysis and critique of the epistemic constraints and conceptual affordances that have come to condition pedagogical possibility. By putting (apparent) educational givens in contact with a range of seemingly alien objects, transversal theories and strange examples (i.e. the computational imaging of a black hole, the derivative recalibrations of speculative finance and the strange programming of reality TV) the speculative experiments that make up this work reframe and reorient both the educational problems and solutions raised by today’s “end times” scenario.

It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a speculative programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to problematize, and ultimately counter-actualize, potentials of and for Pedagogy at the End of the World.