pedagogy at the end of the world: weird pedagogies for unthought educational futures
// doctoral research project //
This study investigates contemporary educational research and practice in terms of how education systems produce resources for thinking “the future,” or what is understood in this study as educational futurity. Through an investigation of the unthinkable pedagogical problematics characteristic of the age of the (so-called) Anthropocene, this study will uncover the axioms that have come to define educational futurity, while also projecting a series of weird speculations on how educational future(s) might be re-imagined towards an understanding of pedagogy at “the end of the world as we know it.”
Our contemporary moment, an era (contentiously) termed the Anthropocene, is characterized by environmental, social and psychic crises that seemingly have the potential to derail modes of thinking bound by historicism and past habits, particularly in the field of education. Beyond typical warnings of climate change, the notion of the Anthropocene signals both an indexical relation of the planet to all-too-human regimes of control, extraction and manipulation (Colebrook, 2016; Zylinksa, 2018; Yusoff, 2018) as well as, somewhat paradoxically, the autonomy and wayward causalities of the planet itself, or what Isabelle Stengers (2015) terms “the intrusion of Gaia”: a “‘nature’ that has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all.” While, in 2020/2021, this planetary mutation has manifested through viral contagion — i.e. a global pandemic and its attendant socio-political crises — this is just one instance of the crises that are gathering force and speed across the globe today. Heat deaths, massive floods, the end of food, climate plagues, poisoned oceans, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, ongoing social fractures, the breakdown of democratic practices, a revival of fascistic ideologies, and a general inability to imagine, let alone address, these ongoing crises raise urgent, albeit incredibly difficult, questions about the future of this planet we call Home.
Transposed to the site of education, the reorganization of planetary realities ushered by unprecedented ecological, social, economic and political transformations necessitates an encounter with a litany of dizzying prospects about “the future” of education. However, and as I wager in this project, it is becoming increasingly clear that despite the pressing challenges on the horizon (or in many cases, that are already here), dominant conceptualizations of educational futurity struggle to hold the line, keeping outdated rhythms afloat, or worse, double-down on nostalgic, even authoritarian, visions that are as oppressive as they are untenable.
This project therefore aims to interrupt this concerted narrowing of educational possibility, and ultimately futurity, in order to experiment with modes and methods of actualizing pedagogical life in ways previously deemed unimaginable. As such, this study interrogates the pedagogical problematics through which contemporary educational (un)thinkability is itself conditioned, so as to counter-actualize methodology-as-usual within the field of educational research, while concomitantly developing a weird pedagogy. As developed in the doctorate research project, a weird pedagogy is an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a speculative programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to unsettle and singularize otherwise diminished conditions of pedagogical possibility. Through the development of this speculative pedagogical trajectory, this study not only offers an experiment in pedagogical thought, but also functions to intervene within educational theory and research — into the process of study itself — so as to conjure a weird pedagogy adequate to the unthought and unthinkable milieu in which education is situated today.
// related projects + publications //
Close encounters of the pedagogical kind: Science-fictioning a curriculum-to-come.
Dispatch from the future: Science-fctioning (in) the Anthropocene.
Beyond belief: Visionary cinema, becoming imperceptible and pedagogical resistance.