Deborah Britzman’s remarkable question, ‘What holds education back?’, appears more urgent than ever in a world of accelerating environmental crises, climate change, and what has been described as omnicide – the annihilation of everything. What, then, holds education back from initiating radical change under these urgent conditions? This paper introduces the notion of ‘institutional anxiety’ as a consolidating force and explores how it may condition possibilities for resistance. Bringing examples from ethnographic fieldwork and experiences of course development in conversation with (...) psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic thought, a key catalyst of institutional anxiety is discussed: Anxiety related to ‘the question of the animal’ as a threat to human exceptionalism in educational practice and research. Confronting these anxieties could open new modes of being and acting in academic space and give interspecies ethics, justice and sustainability a chance to develop in omnicidal times. (shrink)

Animals are at work everywhere in education, yet existing nowhere: Education doesn’t know them beyond their instrumental use value; as animals-for-us (Pedersen, 2019a, p. 7; Wallin, 2014, p. 149; c...

Metamorphoses of the Zoo marshals a unique compendium of critical interventions that envision novel modes of authentic encounter that cultivate humanity's biophilic tendencies without abusing or degrading other animals. These take the form of radical restructurings of what were formerly zoos or map out entirely new, post-zoo sites or experiences. The result is a volume that contributes to moral progress on the inter-species front and eco-psychological health for a humankind whose habitats are now mostly citified or urbanizing.

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and—worker, who enters education and research laboratories under (...) false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the “negative spaces” of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration. (shrink)