Special Issue in Ethics & EducationPedagogical Forms in Times of PandemicWith the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Spring 2020, campus life came to a halt. In many places all over the world, p...

This paper is a response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote lecture. Taking its point of departure in a befriended support of his argument, the paper begins in the mood of affirmation as a form of critique. Thereafter it engages, first, with what it reads as a slightly retrotopian approach to digitalization in the paper. Second, it brings to attention that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration, which Masschelein suggests, always involves a moment of return or repetition. The question is asked what (...) form the gesture of retrieving inherited pedagogical forms from the past takes in Masschelein’s proposal, and it is suggested that such retrieving is a work of constant translation. Third, a comment is made about the advocating of orature, issuing the reminder that on-campus education usually comes without noise reduction, that is, it requires reflection also on the discord that is calibrated in and through our voices. (shrink)

This paper considers what is at stake in the idea of universitas – a community of masters and scholars – in the context of the shifting landscape of higher education engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, we consider what it means to be together in a university community. We draw a distinction between the idea of ‘functioning’ as universitas and ‘being’ universitas, arguing that, that while universities have continued to function effectively through the pandemic, (...) something of what it means to be universitas has been lost. We explore, through Marcel’s concepts of disponibilité and indisponibilité (availability and unavailability), presence and communion, what is at stake in our being with others, and participating in their plenitude. We conclude that being bodily present to each other opens up possibilities for realising something of what it means to be universitas as a community of masters, scholars and students. (shrink)

This paper explores comedy as a queer pedagogical form that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating ‘form’ less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of formation that positions these in dynamic relation to the wider context in which comedies are encountered, we mobilise the idea of queer pedagogical forms to capture how comedy can foster new modes of thinking about and embodying queerness for, and (...) with, audiences. Drawing on specific examples from Schitt’s Creek and Derry Girls, we document the potential of specific comedic modalities (e.g. irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and slapstick) to foster alternative representations of queerness, in which normative tropes are poked fun at, problematised, and reimagined. Through these examples, we demonstrate how comedies can enable us to ‘laugh ourselves out of the closets’ we live by, feel, navigate, and embody. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of potential through a Deleuzean lens and argues that what is commonly understood as potential is often confused with possibility. It moves through four parts: an introduction exploring the language and context in which potential is ordinarily used in order to uncover underlying presuppositions; the next section explores key concepts from Difference and Repetition- namely the Dogmatic Image of Thought, Virtuality and Actuality- to illuminate ways in which a more nuanced concept of potential might be (...) understood, arguing that it is a creative process, rather than a fixed characteristic. Next, it explores how improvisation is a way in which potential can be experienced, before finally considering how changes to education practice- specifically a move towards a more mechanised, digitally-orientated world- might be wholly irreconcilable with potential as a creative process of encountering, and risks a much more impoverished concept that is liable to concretion. (shrink)

The period March 2020–March 2021 marks the time reference for this theoretical study as it denotes the initial surge of the Pandemic, where whole societies were destabilized by the ferocity of Covid-19. Within this context, I posit COVID-19 as a transforming event: one that exhausts worlds. Drawing from Jan Masschelein’s works on Arendt and the architecture of public education, the question at hand is how does Covid-19, as a transforming event, affect and change the very essence of education? I begin (...) by comparing two definitions of crisis, Arendt’s notion of krisis, with philosopher Peter Pal Pelbart’s thinking around crisis, illness, and ‘exhaustion.’ I conclude by identifying an ‘inconsequential’ architectural space, a ‘spandrel.’ This spatial by-product, revealed during the Pandemic, is located within the very design of the ‘perfect’ public school, schole: the Arendtian ‘table.’ This spandrel aligns with Fernand Deligny’s ‘primordial communism.’. (shrink)

Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and the many alternatives during the COVID19-pandemic raised the question of pedagogical form. In a sense, pandemic education in its two-dimensionality was a frictionless, sanitized reduction of education to pure form; it offered a more efficient transfer of knowledge and was marked by a heightened means-to-an-end logic. This has made the informal, unforming and deformational activity that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call study even more difficult, if not impossible during pandemic education. In this (...) article, we consider the pitfalls of thinking in terms of pedagogical form and the formalization of education by engaging with Emile Bojesen’s work on education as (de)formation. Via Harney and Moten, we reflect on what the concept/practice of study by way of formless formation teaches us about (pre-)pandemic education and about pedagogical forms that might be in keeping with study in post-pandemic education. (shrink)

The pandemic implied an acceleration of the impending devastation of various forms of public pedagogical life attached to the campus, changing the ecology of study and affecting the sense-ability and response-ability of the university as an ‘association for/to study’ (‘universitas studii’). This contribution sketches two developments that play a role in this weakening of pedagogical life: the establishment and expansion of a hyper-modern learning factory and the creation of the figure of the independent learner. It is suggested that the rejuvenation (...) and regeneration of pedagogical life can be supported by a critical pedagogy that cultivates the art of distinction in order to describe and indicate the distinctions that matter to various forms of pedagogical life and what they make happen. This is then exemplified through a brief discussion of the lecture and the seminar engendering ‘spoken science’. Finally, it is indicated how a rejuvenation and regeneration implicates students and scholars. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are for many the defining features of the early twenty-first century. With such a provocation, this essay considers how one might understand the relational philosophies articulated by Indigenous learning scientists, Indigenous technologists and feminine philosophers of education as co-constitutive of an ensemble mediating or regulating an educative philosophy interfacing with ML/AI. In these mediations, differing vocabularies – kin, the one caring, cooperative – are recognized for their ethical commitments, yet challenging epistemic claims in (...) the contexts of ML. Similarly, ML poses some questions to claims made about relational and Indigenous epistemologies, where the latter is perceived as separated from and unaffected by computation specifically or algorithmic societies generally. This essay seeks to gain several vantage points to explore and complicate how diverse relational philosophies can address ML and perhaps reconsider their own critical practices. (shrink)

Pandemic disruptions to schooling threw into sharper relief the entanglements of economy, gender norms, and education that had been there, and throughout the modern world, all along. The particular entanglement this paper aims to unravel is the reliance of education on a certain kind of attentiveness, historically provided by a feminized teaching force and mothers, that itself rests on the cultivation of particular sensibilities regarding time.

Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to (...) the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Troy Richardson’s Terence McLaughlin’s Lecture. In it, I discuss how Richardson provides a unique reading of relationality, drawing together technology studies, Indigenous Education and feminist philosophy of education. Seeking to walk with key ideas he develops, this response also points to a possible limitation in seeing Noddings ethic of care as part of a feminist relational ontology that can help inform new ways of understanding ‘machine learning’. In particular, I introduce the notion of worlding (...) as a way of complementing Richardson’s reading of relationality – a notion that has profound implications for pedagogical practice. (shrink)

This article describes the experience of two educators in a master program in Pedagogy in the Netherlands. Their experience is of an online gathering with students and educators that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and educators were not allowed to meet face-to-face, thus resorted to online education. What happened at that online gathering was that the educators observed how the group connected to each other in a way that was reminiscent of the ‘normal’ face-to-face gatherings before the pandemic, (...) but had been absent since the group was forced to meet online. The article starts with individual, subjective descriptions of this experience by the two educators. Subsequently, these so-called thick descriptions are interpreted and analysed. The purpose of zooming in on this particular experience is to gain insight into what pedagogical forms contributed to the enabling of this perceived authentic connectedness in the digital sphere. (shrink)