Out Now! Sound Research for Troubling Times: Hope In Crisis

Very excited to share this project that I made with my dear pal Owen Chapman and many of the folks I had the pleasure of making and thinking with during my postdoc at Concordia University. Check it out here!

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This edited collection takes the prompt “hope in crisis” as a starting point for investigating sound research as it is situated in these troubling times. The book brings together thinkers from numerous scholarly domains (i.e. communication studies, art education, creative art therapy, psychology and philosophy) to explore the question of hope as it relates to sonic research-creation practices in/and times of crisis. Importantly, while sound research is explored in this book in relation to hope, it is not offered up as a better way forward, nor is it presented as a solution. Sound research is instead posed as a question, with each author responding in their own way through experiments with the potentials, but also limits, of and for sonic practices. Central to the project, then, is the question of how to collectively and creatively respond to the increasingly difficult— even untenable—circumstances that have come to limit future possibilities, both within fields of research but also beyond, without falling back on the unquestioned assumption that hope alone will actualize a desired otherworld. The sound research gathered here experiments with such possibilities in order to grapple with how present conditions, including conditions for research, are always contingent—always already in trouble—and thus also subject to change both conceptually and materially.

Performance-Lecture w/ Rémy Boquillon @ Tangentiality: Passing Relations in the Arts, Literature, Music, and Performan

Tangentiality: Passing Relations in the Arts, Literature, Music, and Performance

University of Copenhagen, 15 Oct. - 17 Oct. 2024. Organizers: Department of Art and Cultural Studies / Stefanie Heine and Holger Schulze. READ MORE >>>

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Cursory Touches: Algorithmic Mediation as Tangential Conjuring

jessie beier & Rémy Bocquillon (Assistant Professor, Concordia University Montréal, Art Education & Lecturer, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingoldstadt, Sociology)

The tangent – as line, as surface, as volume – is only actualized through encounter. This touching relation is always flee(t)ing, it is one of brief attention, an encounter en passant: the slight touching of shoulders on a crowded street, the longing brush of a hand along a dusty shelf, the skimming over of theories in an academic paper. A digressive departure? Or is it a distracted avoidance? Despite this “mere touching,” imprints, however slight, are left behind; traces are drawn, flows are redirected, desires remachined. The point of contact becomes a point of impact, a singular event wherein differential forces intersect in ways that we can’t see coming, only leaving. Such events carry no specific outcomes or utility, but they can nevertheless make their mark. The tangential relation, as cursory and punctual as it might be, is not indifferent, but emerges in difference. It is an encounter en passant that refuses to merely pass by.

Taking off from this tangential thinking, this collaborative performance-lecture experiments with passing relations as they might emerge, in unforeseen and non-linear ways, through aesthetic practices (where aesthetics refers to sensorial conditioning and perceptual distributions, aesthetics as aisthesis). In this particular occurrence, the invocation of tarot reading as an algorithmic medium turned occulted composition device will be combined with philosophical riffing and sonic computational techniques (such as live coding) in order to experiment with how seemingly codified and codifiable moments of interaction emerge not as causally-entangled relation but instead as “dark precursors” (Deleuze, 1994). Here, we understand the tangential relation as just one form of “aberrant nuptial” (Deleuze, 1994), as just one instance of the subtractive encounters that are enabled between the momentary touching of systems characterized by fundamental difference. It is through this touch that we hope to invoke, or better, conjure, unthought modes of collectivity where the “collective” refers to a sense of anorganic and inhuman multiplicity that deploys itself beyond individual entanglements toward “the side of preverbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimited sets” (Guattari, 1995, p. 9). Through this performance-lecture we want to consider, in witchy ways, how the tangential meeting of “heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance” (Assis & Giudici, 2017, p. 9) might impact our own thinking, as artists, teachers and researchers of sociology and pedagogy, in yet unthought ways.

A-POSITIONING Project Screening at Concordia


We are thrilled to share our latest collective artistic project with you! We – jessie beier, José Cortés and Veronica Mockler – created a video piece that we premiered at CSEA/SCÉA this summer, which explores questions around art(X)education–it’s reasons, aims, possibilities and frustrations–in relation to what we call A-Positioning.

What: A-Positioning Project Screening + Discussion

Where: Concordia Art Education Graduate Studio (EV5.825), located on the 5th floor of the EV Building (1515 Saint-Catherine St W)

When: Thursday, September 26th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. 

About A-Positioning:

The question of art education–what it is, what it does–has been in the mouths of theorists and the hands of practitioners for decades now. While the field is often characterized by and celebrated for its indiscernibility, there remains a stubborn resistance to change at both systemic and subjective levels (Coates, 2020, p. 45). This inflexibility is not just symptomatic of art(X)education’s ongoing institutional standardizations and neoliberal recuperations but also points to a deep sense of frustration in the field, a widespread dissatisfaction fueled by the idea that change is both inevitable and impossible. In this project, we put such frustrations to the test via an art(X)education user dissatisfaction survey that was developed as one way to experiment with the very threshold of what is perceived possible, and thus impossible, within art(x)education practices today. This work was performed, shot, edited and presented in just a few short days during a recent road trip to Halifax for CSEA/SCÉA and features a series of phone conversations with folks who have thoughts on, and as it turns out, frustrations with, art and its education. As just one experiment in a-positioning, this project has got us thinking about strange vantages, partial perspectives, barely audible frequencies, pedagogical personas, and embodied tactics that fly under-the-radar or, sometimes, out the window.


Making the E.E.R.K. (a dispatch from Mark Simpson)

Making the E.E.R.K.

By Mark Simpson, co-author of Energy Emergency Repair Kit

It’s 7:40 am on July 24 when the email arrives: “Town of Jasper, Jasper National Park, evacuated due to wildfire.” Two days later, the fire reaches the rustic townsite, burning so fiercely it has created its own pyrocumulonimbus weather system complete with a raging firewall nearly 400 feet tall. By the next morning, over a third of the town has burned to the ground. The devastation’s quicksilver speed is quite simply staggering. While many factors contribute to this wildfire – cuts to the provincial firefighting budget, dead growth left by mountain pine beetle infestation, fire suppression practices, the aesthetics of wilderness that condition and produce how mountain parks are supposed to look – it’s brutally obvious that climate crisis is the driving cause, a fact made all the more painful by Alberta’s status as an obdurately, obtusely climate-skeptical petrostate. Welcome, yet once more, to what Andreas Malm calls the warming condition (The Progress of This Storm 11).

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit, a multimodal, genre-bending manual I’ve created with my comrades in the E.E.R.K. Collective, was written with such harrowing occasions firmly in mind and in view.

READ ON>>>

CSEA 2024 Workshop: A-Positional Coordinations: Putting ArtxEducation’s Frustrations to the Test

2024 CSEA/SCÉA National Conference: Prepositioning, Propositioning, and Positioning Art-Education

Thursday, June 27 to Sunday, June 30, 2024, Kjipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki {Halifax, Nova Scotia}

Conference Program >>>

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A-Positional Coordinations: Putting ArtxEducation’s Frustrations to the Test

Workshop + Video Installation w/ Jose Cortes and Veronica Mockler

Saturday, June 29, 2024, 10:20-11:50 AM

The question of art education – what it is, what it does –  has been in the mouths of theorists and the hands of practitioners for decades now. While the field is often characterized by, and celebrated for, its indiscernibility, there remains a stubborn resistance to change at both systemic and subjective levels  (Coates, 2020, p. 45). This inflexibility is not just symptomatic of ArtxEducation’s ongoing institutional standardizations and neoliberal recuperations, but also points to a deep frustration in the field, a widespread dissatisfaction fuelled by the idea that change is impossible. In this performative panel session, we aim to put such frustrations to the test in order to develop a series of a-positional coordinations that seek to experiment with the very threshold of what is perceived im/possible in the first place. Bringing together our individual and collective work wherein we have developed protocols and devices for in/visibility, non-proprietary writing/making strategies and tactics for navigating horizon/less futures, this panel will involve a series of coordinated exercises wherein we will collectively develop and then deploy an a-positional navigation apparatus in situ. Importantly, our gesture towards a-positioning here is not apolitical in its desires and demands, but instead necessitates a critical interrogation of the partial perspectives and limited standpoints through which we have learned to strategically place ourselves as artist-educators. With this in mind, the aim of this performative and interactive panel is to collectively experiment with strange vantages, unthought distributions, barely audible frequencies and embodied tactics that fly under-the-radar. Working together with participants, we hope to frustrate those taken-for-granted modes of positioning that keep us stuck in place, leaving us feeling stranded, alienated and defeated, so as to move, with curiosity and care, toward actualizing ArtxEducation’s desired otherworlds.

Petrocultures 2024: Los Angeles

PETROCULTURES 2024 - OIL CITIES AND POST-OIL CITIES

University of Southern Califronia, May 15-18, 2024

E2. Energy Emergency Repair Kit

Panelists: jessie beier (Concordia), Mark Simpson (U Alberta), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta)

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K. combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. Prompted by the urgency of climate change and the injustices of racial-fossil capitalism, it brings together theory and poetics in order to provoke and inspire critical inquiry and creative imagining about what could come next. If energy emergencies loom everywhere, what possibilities for care and repair might they ignite? The panel presentation we propose will introduce some of the key features of the E.E.R.K. as it relates to questions of care and repair at the intersection of energy, infrastructure and urban life. This panel will take the form of a collaborative performance, followed by a Q&A Session, where we, the dedicated E.E.R.K team, will offer some hands-on experience with the E.E.R.K and its non-programmatic, yet highly pragmatic, collection of instructions, diagrams, and spells. In more specific terms, this (sometimes interactive) presentation will move through ways of getting to know your energy emergency before tuning in to mycelial networks in order to rethink how petro-infrastructures might be resituated in relation to the subtractive logics afforded by experimental practices of decompoesis. It will then outline some non-standard operating procedures (NSOPs) and conclude with selected exercises in ritual maintenance.

D2. Panel: Necropetroculture and its Hauntings

jessie beier (Concordia) & Mark Simpson (U Alberta) - “Energy Mediacy”

This paper theorizes energy mediacy against familiar ideas of energy literacy and energy transition. Focusing on the weirdly contradictory capacities of blockchain, a notable energy infrastructure today, we examine the normative il/logics of energy transition and energy literacy to consider how energy mediacy as a subtractive mode might provide different coordinates for thinking and doing. At stake is a desire to reframe the temporal ambit of speculation as a practice that unfixes futurity, serving not to predict some better energy future but to fold energy-to-come, as an unknown yet urgent problem, into the here and now.

Dr. jessie beier joins Art Education in tenure-track appointment (Concordia University)

The Department of Art Education is thrilled and proud to announce that Dr. jessie beier has been appointed as assistant professor in a tenure-track appointment as of May 15 2024. Many of you know Dr. beier in her current role as assistant professor (LTA) and we are very fortunate to continue to learn from and leverage her innovative teaching, research, research-creation and apprenticeship practices.

READ ON>>>

philoSOPHIA 2024: Messaging the Future + Research at the Sonic Brink

Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing is the 17th meeting of philoSOPHIA, a society for continental feminism. We’ll be meeting as a hybrid conference on Treaty 7 Territory in southern Alberta, hosted by Mount Royal University’s Library in Calgary, Canada on March 14-17, 2024. 

Messaging the Future: Lathe-Cut Records as Time Travelling Device (w/ Owen Chapman)

In this workshop, we will work together to plan, craft and then record short messages to the future, which, using our trusty Masco RK-5 portable “suitcase cutter” record lathe, will be cut onto polycarbonate records that, fortunately and unfortunately, will persist long after “us” — some 200 years into the future (depending on storage conditions). Working through this process together, we hope to explore a range of weird philosophical questions about (all-too-linear forms of) temporality and (plastic) futurity, about the materiality of sonic expression (only some of which we can hear), and about the limits, but also potentials, of the very desire, and thus ambition, to message the future. 

Making, Doing and Sensing at the Sonic Brink: Paper Presentation

This performance-lecture aims to experiment, and potentially break with, the figure of the horizon and its standardized modes of perception in order propose a counter-gesture, through a figure I call the sonic brink. Opposed to the linear, individual and correlational geometries that undergird optical horizons, the sonic brink is a speculative diagram that resituates questions of perception, thinkability and agency in relation to aural intrusions, collective resonances, immanent noise, and, ultimately, sound refusal. The aim here is to not only talk about what sound can do, but to deploy sound as philosophical material in its own right. As such, this performance-lecture aims to practice weird forms of sonic thinking as just one mode of reorienting approaches to feminist making, doing, and sensing.

Public Talk - Accessible Pedagogies for the “End Times”: Work, Energy, Sustainability

Accessible Pedagogies for the “End Times”: Work, Energy, Sustainability

What is the work of accessible pedagogy given the convergence of crises in which education is situated today? Taking this question as a starting point, this talk outlines an approach to accessible pedagogy that centres work, energy and sustainability in order to develop an intersectional and critical disability framework for rethinking inclusive art education practices. 

New Article - No Going Back: Un-Fixing the Future of De-Extinction

New article out now in Animal Studies Journal — Access via your institution and/or reach out for a PDF!

Abstract: ‘Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world’ proclaims the Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences website, adding, ‘And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it’. For Colossal, this involves combining the science of genetics with ‘the business of discovery’ in order to bring back the woolly mammoth, which will not only help ‘rewild’ lost habitats, but also contribute toward ‘making humanity more human’. De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence, often with the goal of reintroducing species to the wild and restoring ecosystems. While still in its nascent state, the science of de-extinction is currently expanding and advancing through, for instance, projects like Colossal’s, raising numerous ethical, social and technological debates about what defines a species, and thus its regeneration; how such definitions shape conservation paradigms; and, ultimately, what we mean when we talk about life, death and species extinction. With their commitment to ‘reversing climate change’ while also ‘advanc[ing] the economies of biology and healing through genetics’, Colossal’s work has not only been deemed ‘game-changing’ in terms of “saving” endangered species, but also in terms of ‘future proofing’ the environment by reshaping how the world thinks about the power of genetics for solving pressing challenges in the life sciences today, including the challenge of extinction. In this de-extinction example, then, the problem of extinction is actualized in relation to solutions aimed at enacting further control over the planet, this time by ‘rewinding’ and ‘reversing’ ecological destruction, so as to fix the human-caused disaster, and in so doing, fix the future. In this essay, I trace the line between ‘the business of discovery’ and ‘making humanity more human’ in order to draw out what I see as some of the broader refrains and fixations that have come to infect future-oriented ecological discourse in these times of dying. Looking to the example of Colossal, I examine the ways in which extinction, and the corollary project of de-extinction, has become at once a territorializing force that works to re-install monohumanist fantasies of planetary control, and a potentially deterritorializing force for letting go and giving up.

Out Now! Pedagogy at the End of the World

Out Now! Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures

This book interrogates the ways in which “end of the world” thinking has come to define and delimit pedagogical approaches in Anthropocene times. Chapters unfold through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity—sustainable futures, energy futures, working futures—each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical unthinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on unthought educational trajectories. Specifically, the book 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. It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental pedagogical anti-model, a speculative program for the unprogrammable that seeks to counter-actualize potentials of and for unthinking pedagogy at the (so-called) end of the world.

Access via your institution and/or reach out for a PDF!

Praise for Pedagogy at the End of the World

Nothing might seem more worthy than a pedagogy that saves the world. Nothing might seem more impossible than a pedagogy in end times. Beier’s Weird Pedagogy challenges the assumptions of futurity embedded in the philosophy and practice of education in order to forge a pedagogy that embraces the challenges of twenty-first century disruptions. Rather than simply coping with end times, Weird Pedagogy creates a new theory of time and education. Beier’s timely and stimulating book is essential reading for those working in philosophy of education, and in Extinction/Anthropocene studies.

Claire Colebrook, Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Pennsylvania State University, US, and author of The Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 and Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 (Open Humanities Press 2014)

If educational theory and philosophy had its own ‘X-Files’, it might look something akin to Beier’s reorientation of education to the weird. In this remarkable book, Beier accomplishes the difficult task of subtracting educational thought from its normative foundations, revealing in turn much stranger conditions for thinking and doing education. An important book and singular contribution to educational thought.

Jason Wallin, Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum, University of Alberta, Canada, and author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2010)

Beier’s radical new mapping of pedagogy both deconstructs the powers and pleasures of pedagogy, while creating strange and optimistic futures for how we think and teach the world that can be implemented now as acts of activism and imagination. Beier takes critical ecological and ethical issues to show the urgency of the role of pedagogy in undoing anthropocentric dominance.

Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, UK, and author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury 2020)

a bead, a breath // Collaboration with Carrie Allison

a bead, a breath

Work by Carrie Allison; Curated by Katie Belcher; Access Gallery, Vancouver, 22 Apr to 15 Jul 2023

a bead, a breath is an exhibition that thinks through caregiving, motherhood, stories, and intergenerational connections, with two videos My Moon (2022) and Our Hands, Our Body, Our Spirit (2022), and sculptural work, BEADZ (2023). Video, animation, and sculpture are grounded in the ongoing and ancestral technology of beadwork—set to ambient scores by Jessie Beier. Continuing generations of Indigenous women’s labour, beadwork mirrors both craft and new media practices in its repetition, rhythm, and storytelling. Carrie Allison says, it “is an act of care, of giving time to, and getting to know; beading is spending time with your ancestors through the shared gesture of sewing and beading.” - Katie Belcher

READ ON >>>

CHECK OUT CARRIE ALLISON’S WORK HERE >>>

No Outsides: Metal in an Era of Contagion

June 6–9 2023, Concordia University, Montreal /Tiohtià:ke, Canada

Six decades from its counter-cultural inception, what remains of metal’s relation to the outside forces of extremity, abolition and transformation? The 2023 ISMMS conference, which will be hosted by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, students and artists, will explore this question through a series of talks, artistic interventions, panels and workshops. Oriented toward the question of metal study’s relationship to the outside in an era of contagion, this conference will explore questions related to themes of urgency and emergency, extremity and enclosure, contagion and containment, plurality and polarization, queerness and ecological outsides, and futurity and fatality.

Read on…

CSSE 2023: Reimagining Science and Education in the Anthropocene

CSSE Conference - May 27-June 1, 2023 - York University - Toronto, Canada

This symposium invites a transdisciplinary discussion about reimagining education in the geologic and political times often referred to as the Anthropocene (a term that is uneven in its affects and has its own politics and history). It brings together the work of educators and researchers from many different locations and disciplines in an effort to meet the CSSE 2023 call for reimaginings and reconfigurations of education for justice and the flourishing of all life.

Jessie Beier — Black Hole Sustainability

In this presentation/provocation, I will respond to the questions posed, and then pose a few more, via a short speculative study of what I call “black hole sustainability.” My own take will approach the tensions raised by the Anthropocene, and more specifically the affirmative relaunching of post-Anthropocene educational futurity, by situating the panel questions in relation to education and the problem of sustainable futures. In a move to enact a resituating of (science) education, I bring the (purported) problem of educational futurity in contact with the computational imaging of a black hole so as to develop a weird pedagogy of endurance — a black hole sustainability - that might be capable of upending education’s unquestioned salvation narratives so as to navigate horizonless futures. Taking off from this example, I will raise questions about the potentials, but also limitations, of speculative practice in and as educational research.

CSLP Kicks Off the 'Lathe Cut Conversations'

“On April 17, 2023, several members of the CSLP – Annabelle Brault, Martin Lalonde, and Owen Chapman – joined Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow Jessie Beier in the CSLP’s Research-Creation room to spend a few hours in recorded conversation about the interrelationships between performance and learning.”

READ MORE HERE >>>

LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT HERE >>>

From left to right: Annabelle Brault, Jessie Beier, Owen Chapman, Angus Tarnawsky & Martin Lalonde pose with the fruit of their labour