School-level education in Australia, and in other parts of the world, is currently directed by forces of conformity and compliance. These forces are typically characterised by doctrines of standards ...and standardisation, and metrics of accountability and performance. Yet, education in Australia is simultaneously underwritten by values of democracy, equity and justice. The tension between conformity and compliance, and education for democracy produces an ethical and practical struggle for teachers. Recent research tells us that education driven by conformity and compliance de-democratises the experience of schooling for both teachers and young people, while also undermining efforts to cultivate democracy across generations. Drawing on Lefebvre, this paper offers a spatial account of curriculum that opens new spaces of possibility and imagination for doing curriculum work beyond compliance. Curriculum in this paper is theorised across a triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space. This theorisation offers a way to describe how the administrative and regulatory spaces of official curriculum and policy cut across and entangle with the everyday and lived curriculum spaces of teachers and young people. The situated intersections of these spaces shape the way curriculum is enacted and experienced in local settings. I bring bell hooks’ pedagogy of imagination into conversation with this theorisation to propose how the perceived and lived spaces of curriculum might be reimagined as radical spaces of possibility that enable an education that is at its heart democratic, and that works
for
democracy and social justice.
Taking inspiration from the vast breadth of Castoriadis’ oeuvre, this article provides an ongoing elucidation of the being of human as creation ex nihilo. It does so by engaging with Castoriadis’ ...reflections on the vis formandi pertaining to the human condition and his tentative introduction to the concept of the ‘human Nonconscious’. Across many of his essays, Castoriadis refers to the vis formandi of the being of human as an ‘a-causal’ and as a corporeal power of formation and of creation. Associated with the defunctionalized and the corporeal dimensions of the radical imagination, these two domains of formation and of creation are, for Castoriadis, fundamental to the ontology of the being of human. By exploring Castoriadis’ theoretical and practical reflections on the vis formandi of the being of human and the role he accords the two dimensions of the radical imagination, this article offers a new mode of thinking about the being of human as creation ex nihilo – one that addresses the mind body divide by proposing that the human Nonconscious can be envisaged as the dominion of the embodied imagination.
Die Wichtigkeit aktueller Trends in Technologie, Digitalisierung und Massenmedien für die globale Kultur führt zu Fragen nach der Verantwortlichkeit und Ethik forscherischer Entscheidungen in den ...Sozial- und Gesundheitswissenschaften. Eingebettet in die jeweils dominanten Paradigmen affizieren diese Trends subtil unsere Weltsicht, unsere Werte und den Charakter sozio-politischer Diskurse. In diesen kritischen post-normalen Zeiten (SARDAR 2009) werden radikale Imagination (HAIVEN & KHASNABISH 2014) und epistemischer Aktivismus, verbunden mit nicht-dominanten Weisen der Wissensproduktion, zu einer Notwendigkeit. Kunstbasierte Forschung (KBF) beinhaltet onto-epistemologische Perspektiven und Methodologien, die erforderlich sind, um die gegenwärtigen unilateralen und hegemonialen Paradigmen herauszufordern und zu stören, die den überkommenen gesellschaftlichen und geo-politischen Konstrukten unterliegen. In diesem Beitrag vertreten wir die Etablierung eines globalen Netzwerks von KBF-Wissenschaftler*innen und Stakeholdern und die Nutzung einer radikal-imaginativen Philosophie und von kunstbasierten Verfahren als Ausgangspunkte für sozialen Aktivismus und einen epistemologischen Wechsel.
This paper explores the idea, and some elements of the (potential) practice, of utopian pedagogy. It begins by outlining the general aims of 'utopian pedagogy' and notes the shift within contemporary ...writings away from the metaphor of the architect (armed with a utopian 'blueprint') towards that of the archaeologist. The ontological underpinnings of educational archaeology are discussed before attention turns to a critical examination of the pedagogical process of excavation. The key questions here are (to labour the metaphor) where to dig and how to identify a utopian find. The paper argues that, without a substantive normative vision to serve as a guide, utopian archaeology is conceptually flawed and practically ineffectual, romanticising an endlessly open process of exploration. The final section suggests that the fears associated with utopian architecture (authoritarian imposition, totalising closure) are misplaced and that drawing up a 'blueprint' should be the aim and responsibility of utopian pedagogy.
This essay expands on the concept of educational life and builds on an autonomist Marxist framework that better allows us to understand neoliberalism’s parasitic operations. Following this, the last ...section will confront the limits of the progressive educational imaginary and offer up for consideration postschool imaginaries. Drawing on Kathi Weeks’ concept of postwork imaginaries, Bourassa considers how postschool imaginaries might be conducive for troubling particular operations that have become embedded in the grammar of schooling and, also, how they might cultivate alternative and affirmative forms of educational life both in the present and ‘after neoliberalism.’
“Professionalism was basically a ton of petty shit, nothing ever to do with standing up for children in the face of harmful rules, curriculum, other teachers, administrators, etc. It was basically ...how to comply.” As the student quoted here makes clear, a “professional” teacher must learn to comply, even when doing so does harm to children. This article serves to disrupt the narrow and striated notions of professionalism promoted in many teacher education programs—notions that beg clarity on what is really believed about teaching, children, and what really matters. In school(ed) places, accepting—even welcoming—constraints and blinders that serve to sustain the broader injustices, inequities, and ignorance that infect society is common practice and is often shrouded in the cloak of professionalism. In examining the consequences of compliance disguised as professionalism, it becomes clear that what is necessary to reimagine school places is a nomadic and radical non-compliance. Radicalizing a teacher’s professional life requires deep inquiry, skepticism, integrity, and a nomad’s willingness to challenge and disrupt. Included in this article are examples of critique in the context of reimagining school spaces as spaces of joy, generosity, and justice; of creative maladjustments in the face of mundane mandates; and of the ways in which teachers can radically and nomadically non-comply in order smooth the striations of school(ed) spaces.
The Cost of a Presumed Public Good Alexander, Bryant Keith
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
08/2017, Letnik:
17, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The author offers three vulnerable personal narrative that serve as case studies to explore the cost of a presumed public good, relative to neoliberalism in higher education.
In this essay, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as a key system of knowledge that has informed and shaped black intellectual ...culture and the black radical imagination in South Africa and its transnational iterations. I focus on the work of Keorapetse Kgositsile, who attributes his cultural and political consciousness to his grandmother and mother, and asserts that they equipped him with the wisdom to survive the hostile environment of colonial modernity and apartheid. I put forth questions about a gendered black radical tradition and the place of these (grand)mothers in it. I adopt the heuristic matriarchive, which holds together locally specific matrilineally inherited worldviews, intersubjective relations, vernaculars, and aesthetics. I show how these have shaped pan-African sensibilities in this towering figure of South African modernity. When we consider the manner in which this prominent figure of black intellectual culture carries with him what I call the matriarchive to inform his work and politics in his itinerancy in the black diaspora, we open possibilities to investigate how the matriarchive was brought into locution with transatlantic cultural and political production. The issue of transnationalism and vernaculars serves to illuminate the mutations and transformations of the matriarchive in his work, which has enriched a polyglot internationalism. I argue that his work, shaped by a distinct sense of custom, culture, and community, has transformed his interlocutors in the black diaspora.
The aim of this paper is to reveal the relation between the power of radical imagination and its impact on ethics of AI. The radical imagination is understood as profoundly dialogic, creative power ...existing only through collective, critical encounters. One of the main social and ethical challenges for radical imagination is rethinking of existence of ethical AI. The main issues the paper deals with are: 1. How might we assess whether, and in what circumstances, AIs themselves have moral status? 2. How AIs might differ from humans in certain basic respects relevant to our ethical assessment of them? 3. Is it possible to create AIs more intelligent than human, and ensuring that they use their advanced intelligence for good rather than ill? We argue that there is a strong parallel between ethical intention of radical imagination and those behind human codes of ethics for various professions: they are used to openly and transparently communicate to the outside world what are the norms and values in a particular profession, and by doing that to earn trust and acceptance from outside.
Collective Visioning York, Matt
Radical teacher (Cambridge),
09/2020, Letnik:
118, Številka:
118
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
As the spaces which once existed within the university for the co-imagining of liberatory political praxes diminish, social movements are increasingly reverting to methods of collective visioning ...which have been developed on the streets to theorise radical social change. I argue that such methodologies provide important opportunities for a reappraisal of our hierarchical student/teacher relations, and make the case that we can collectively learn much more from within our movements than anyone might hope to teach us from outside. The article traces our current movement wave, and locates contemporary forms of collective visioning within a wider lineage of knowledge co-production in social movements. The neoliberal subversion of university education is examined, and proposals made for ways in which we might challenge these hegemonic conditions. I conclude that the liberatory epistemologies and forms of knowledge co-production explored in this article offer significant potential for developing new modes of praxis for our current wave of ecological and anti-capitalist activists both inside and outside the university.
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