Weird Pedagogy
// PhD dissertation + ongoing pedagogical experiments //
Weird pedagogy is an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a fabulated programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to problematize, and ultimately counter-actualize, potentials of and for pedagogy at the (so-called) end of the world.
Emerging from my PhD research and further developed in Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), this project interrogates the apocalyptic habits and anthropocentric assumptions shaping education in the Anthropocene. By putting established educational frameworks in contact with strange objects and transversal theories—such as black hole imaging, speculative finance, and reality TV—weird pedagogy reframes how we might imagine pedagogical futures otherwise. Through a series of speculative studies on sustainability, energy, and labour, this work experiments with concepts that challenge the limits of educational possibility in an era of planetary crisis.
Publications
"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))
Presentations
PRESENTATION VIDEO: CSLP SPEAKER SERIES TALK - JESSIE BEIER on WEIRD PEDAGOGIES FOR THE “END TIMES” >>
Germinating Weird Pedagogies
The projects below are living experiments in weird pedagogy that test the boundaries of teaching, learning, and making through speculative, interdisciplinary, collective, and experimental approaches. From research-creation and interactive installations to speculative dinner parties and sonic manifestos, each project develops weird pedagogical coordinations and fabulates unthought educational trajectories.
Learning Machines [Research-Creation Project; 2024-2025]; A-Positioning [Performance + Video Installation; 2024-2025]; Lathe-Cut Records [Interactive Sound Installation; 2023-2025}; Anthropocene Abécédaire [Illustrated Book Project; 2022-2025]; Landscape of Hope [Postdoctoral Research Fellowship; 2021-2023]; Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) {Mult-media Art Book + Sound Compositions; 2021-2024]; Ahuman Pedagogy [Lecture Series + Co-Edited Book; 2012-2021]l Feminist Solarities [Workshop + Sonic Manifesto; 2019]