Subversive Pedagogies

Radical Possibility in the Academy

Kate Schick, Claire Timperley, Kate Schick, Claire Timperley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032108100
• eBook ISBN: 9781000485370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This interdisciplinary volume examines the place of critical and creative pedagogies in the academy and beyond, offering insights from leading and emerging international theorists and scholar-activists on innovative theoretical and practical interventions for the classroom, the university, and the public sphere.

Subversive Pedagogies draws attention to creative and critical pedagogies as a resource for engaging pressing problems in global politics. The collection explores the radical potential of pedagogy to transform students, scholars, citizens, and institutions. It brings together scholars and students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including international relations, political science, indigenous studies, feminist theory, and theatre studies, as well as practitioners in theatre and the arts. These diverse voices explore innovative pedagogical practices that extend our understanding of where pedagogy happens, invite critical assessment of the ways the neoliberal university shapes and restricts pedagogical engagement, and offer both theoretical and practical tools to explore more creative and broader understandings of what pedagogy can and should do.

The book will appeal to scholars and students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including international relations, political science, indigenous studies, feminist theory, theatre studies, and education theory, as well as practitioners in theatre and the arts.

PART I Institutional constraints and possibilities

1 REFLECTIONS TOWARDS A TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT FOR RADICAL DEMOCRATIC AND ECOLOGICAL PEDAGOGY

Romand Coles

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217183-3

Several years ago I submitted a manuscript for review in a special issue of New Political Science, which was devoted to exploring the implications of neoliberalisation in higher education for the future of democracy (Coles 2014). My essay focused on how we might generate a game-transformative approach that could counter many of the most deleterious aspects of neoliberalism with the powers of radically democratic publics – in our classrooms, our institutional engagements, and our relationships with myriad partners beyond the academy. The essay’s boldness did not sit well with one reviewer, who insisted that it was entirely wrong-headed to think of faculty members’ democratic pedagogical initiatives as part of an emerging collective transformative process. Rather, faculty members merely pursue their own specific scholarly and teaching interests when they promote such pedagogy and action research, with no aspirations to generate larger strategies for democratisation. Leaving aside the strange “either-or” assumption that seemed to frame the reviewer’s criticism, my response was to re-emphasise and further flesh out the empirical processes of collective agency that were indeed at play in my case study at Northern Arizona University, in relation to which I was theorising.

Though the editors and other reviewers found my revised essay sufficiently compelling for publication, I have revisited the critical reviewer’s claims many times in the past several years. While I still think they were oblivious to the case study and theoretical argument, they remain important and illuminating nevertheless, partly because they themselves exemplify a certain narrow framework that often tacitly informs many otherwise very admirable efforts, and partly because the reviewer was indeed perceptive about the broader scene. Though there are some important larger efforts to cultivate democratically engaged pedagogy and scholarship (nurtured in part by networks such as Imagining America, the American Democracy Project, etc.), to a significant degree the collective and systemically transformative possibilities of such practices remain extremely undeveloped and precarious. This truth is notwithstanding the grandiose claims made by quite a few universities today when branding themselves as ambitiously “engaged” and “impactful” in relation to the “grand challenges” of our times.

Indeed, our efforts at subversive pedagogy and scholarship often amount to less than the sum of our separate initiatives. Many small assemblages of faculty and students are doing amazing work that generates democratically enriched imagination, knowledge, relationships, and practice in connection to crucial challenges. Yet because they do not tend sufficiently to catalysing connections amongst themselves that might foster a broader movement for change, the most powerful dynamics in higher education today continue to be profoundly erosive of such agency. Thus, at the end of each year, while much democratic energy has been given admirable forms, on the whole the spaces and conditions of possibility for such public work in the future usually continue to diminish. Still too siloed, our valiant efforts to think and act otherwise are having little effect upon the transformative neoliberal (and worse) dynamics that are currently driving widespread and deleterious change. So I remain haunted by remarks I initially found merely annoying.

As I have traveled to universities in Australia, North America, and Europe in recent years – often invited to discuss transformative possibilities of democratic engagement in universities and colleges, I have been struck by the specificity and the similarities of the severe challenges wrought by rapidly unfurling neoliberal changes around the world. The deteriorating conditions that were being picketed by the University and College Union (UCU) at 60 universities across the United Kingdom during my visit to the University of Edinburgh in December, 2019, were typical in this regard. Faculty were striking in opposition to ongoing reductions in full-time permanent positions and their conversion into short-term, precarious labour contracts (nine month, hourly, etc.) that greatly decrease faculty agency and power in higher education. This situation is exacerbated by ever-growing workloads and increasing segmentation of faculty teaching, whereby some design courses, some others teach them, and some others yet do the grading. Picketers with whom I spoke said that this process of de-democratisation is further compounded by increasingly hierarchical and corporate structures of governance – from departments controlled by chairs, to colleges that concentrate powers in bloated administrative layers, to Vice Chancellors whose huge salaries, monetised discourse and top–down powers are nearly indistinguishable from that of corporate CEOs. Indeed, most agreed wholeheartedly with widespread claims among critics of neoliberalisation that the most potent dynamics and operating logos of higher education creates less and less space for teaching, learning and forms research that cannot be justified in terms of corporate efficiency, output productivity, consumer satisfaction, and the like. In this context it is not surprising that departments devoted to other purposes are being cut or eliminated altogether, nor that salaries, pensions, and benefits are being slashed – all of which is disempowering, de-democratising, and demoralising.

The strike in the UK was inspiring, and I felt great solidarity with those holding the picket line in Edinburgh. Yet one question I tried to explore in a teach-out on the strike line in the chilly winter wind was how – with and beyond these important defensive actions – we might muster up powers that can not only contest the deleterious dynamics and political manoeuvres, but also transform the game in ways that increasingly empower democratic processes that enable us to proactively shape the directions of higher education and our polities. How might we shift our educational practices, cultures, and politics so that we advance beyond endless contestations confined to modestly limiting some of the most horrible aspects of the towering pile of disaster? How might we move towards visionary pragmatic pedagogies and action research that foster dynamics that greatly enhance democracy, embodied learning, and commonwealth?

Despite the growing constraints under which we work, many opportunities still remain for advancing critical theory, as well as for radically democratic pedagogy, action research partnerships, and institutional changes for commonwealth. These opportunities can, in turn, provide vital platforms for powerfully addressing the widespread erosion of democracy, the collapse of planetary ecosystems, and the pernicious crises of inequality and vitriolic othering (in relation to colonial legacies, class, race, gender, sexuality) that desperately call for our creative responses. However, our efforts to create alternative ways of thinking and acting will likely fail to be transformative unless the myriad micro shifts they engender (in thought, imagination, sensibility, embodiment, relationships, power) are intentionally brought into relationships that foster mutually amplificatory system dynamics, through which broader alternative processes, patterns, and powers can emerge. Engendering such dynamics requires that, beyond individual initiatives and programs, we rapidly create a democratic movement in higher education – before the spaces for doing so diminish towards a point of (potentially) no return.

We live in a time when educational, political, economic, social, and ecological systems are increasingly interacting in ways that intensify and accelerate many of each other’s most catastrophic tendencies. These dynamics generally overwhelm alternative micro initiatives unless the latter are able to engender powerful counter dynamics by cultivating their own connections, intensifications, and accelerations across multiple scales and sectors. Genuinely subversive and transformative initiatives, then, would be those that aspire to profoundly disrupt and alter those meso and macro dynamics within and beyond the academy. Macro dynamics and micro processes are conditions of each other’s possibility and creating change hinges upon cultivating knowledge and practice that engages both at once. This requires that we address micro phenomena as nodes in larger dynamic assemblages, and pursue relationships with those working on other nodes in ways that dramatically and dynamically amplify each other’s capacities to create change.

Those seeking to create changes in higher education that are more conducive to transformative pedagogy and scholarship will benefit from carefully theorising the character of the institutions in which we work – the sorts of challenges and powers that threaten our capacities to engage in such praxis, the constituencies who might be interested in gathering to enact and advance alternatives, the opportunities for organising change, the strategic sensibilities, and horizons that might be most conducive generating desirable transformation. A variety of social theories circulating in the academy today both illuminate and obfuscate the challenges and possibilities before us in different ways. To inquire into possibilities for advancing the dramatic changes we need to protect and expand supportive spaces for critical theory, democratic pedagogy, and engaged action research, I think it is vital that we think carefully about what we can learn from this mix of insight and obfuscation, in order to formulate a critical and transformative approach that can more powerfully orient our endeavours.

In the next section, I offer a brief sketch of some key contemporary theories of systemic critique, assembly, actor networks, game transformative dynamics, and habitus in order to craft a theory of power in higher education (and neoliberalism more generally) that better accounts for both the heterogeneity and potential of the present, and the increasing power and speed of neoliberal/postneoliberal transformation that is undermining the goods and vital potentials of our work and institutions. I conceive of this as a stereoscopic critical theory of systems. Following that I argue that an analogously stereoscopic perspective is key to advancing a generative theory of transformative pedagogy and praxis. I follow these theoretically accented reflections with a section that provides a more textured rendering of this approach to movement-building in relation to transformative pedagogy and praxis. This approach draws on insights – or living theory – from catalytic participatory action research around creating a movement for radically democratic and ecological pedagogy, scholarship, and institutional change, in which I was involved at Northern Arizona University and (to a much lesser extent) in Sydney, Australia.

Stereoscopic disclosure and strategic sensibilities

The various cognitive frames we embrace dispose us to disclose the world in different ways and these often have significant political stakes. Many prominent frameworks circulating in the academy (and beyond) tend to flatten our sense of the systems and assemblages in which we find ourselves and, in turn, suppress transformative scholarship, action research pedagogy, political agency, and change. Here I offer a very condensed analysis of some of these frameworks in order to move towards a more stereoscopic perspective that opens a field of perceptual-cognitive depth that can solicit and support transformative movement.

One common frame among certain strands of critical theory tends to reify systems as fixed, closed, totalising processes that block or co-opt all efforts to create change from within. Indeed, the presumption here is typically that all the elements within a system are governed according to a nearly uniform logic that coherently structures both their internal processes and their external relationships with each other. This totalising understanding of power suppresses finite agency in the present insofar as it displaces our attention, dispositions, and energies away from questions of how we might create change in relation to specific – and potentially heterogeneous – practices, processes, purposes, players, and so forth. Instead this genre either locates all transformative possibility in a vague revolutionary “event” that completely breaks with these dynamics (for example, Badiou 2005),¹ or else confines radical modes of refusal and alternative practice to a space that is somehow potentially autonomous from systems it cannot change – for example, in an “undercommons” (Moten and Harney 2013).²

Another framework, common in civic engagement networks, disposes us to focus our efforts of critical analysis and reform almost entirely on micro levels that can make significant-if-modest differences in people’s lives, while avoiding both the empty grandiosity and authoritarian tendencies of systemic revolutionary posturing.³ This position is in important ways more agentic than the totalising-systemic frame, but it greatly cramps such agency because it has a similarly flattened sense of systems, such as markets and bureaucracies. While this genre often generates compelling ethnography, action research and changes in relation to local communities and issues, it tends to accept broader patterns of systemic power as set background conditions. Such conditions can be held more accountable, negotiated with, and modestly tamed, yet they are not susceptible to radical re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Subversive pedagogues
• Part I Institutional constraints and possibilities
• Part II Radical possibilities within the classroom
• Part III Beyond the academy: creative and activist engagement
• Index