Educational Commons in Theory and Practice

Global Pedagogy and Politics

Alexander J. Means, Derek R. Ford, Graham B. Slater, Alexander J. Means, Derek R. Ford, Graham B. Slater

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137586407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137586414
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons.

© The Author(s) 2017

Alexander J. Means, Derek R. Ford and Graham B. Slater (eds.)Educational Commons in Theory and Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58641-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Toward an Educational Commons

Alexander J. Means¹ , Derek R. Ford² and Graham B. Slater³

(1)

SUNY Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY, USA

(2)

DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, USA

(3)

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Alexander J. Means (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Derek R. Ford

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The present historical moment is one of profound challenges and contradictions. A consolidation of global power has emerged amid a stark fragmentation of everyday life and organized forms of resistance. New modes of alienation from community proliferate alongside an intensification of digital connectivity, while the acceleration of socio-ecologically unsustainable capitalist modernization sharply contrasts with stultifying inertia in realizing viable alternatives. Within this context, reclaiming and redefining a global commons and commonality acquire a new energy and urgency.

The idea of commons has a long history in Western and non-Western thought. Commons discourse has recently been reinvigorated and is now being debated across academic fields, including philosophy, sociology, business, political science, law, anthropology, and ecology. Commons have also become a referent in global policymaking, as is evidenced by the efforts of technocratic organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to imagine new strategies for saving a stagnant global capitalism from its own destructive tendencies (Caffentzis, 2010; Federici, 2009). The commons have also become a key locus of struggle and inspiration across various radical-progressive social movements, for example, in struggles over land dispossession across the global South in places like India and Brazil, as well as in parallel struggles over debt, austerity, precarity, and predatory financialization across the affluent nations of the global North (Mason, 2013; Shiva, 2016). This renewed interest and engagement with commons can be attributed largely to growing recognition of the need for creative responses to a wide array of global crises, such as rampant worldwide militarization and threat of ecological catastrophe, that threaten our collective lives and futures.

The commons are most often invoked as a direct challenge to neoliberal hegemony and the destructive expansionary drive of capitalism to commodify and therefore enclose what remains of the world’s shared fund of natural and cultural wealth (De Angelis, 2007; Harvey, 2003). These enclosures of global commons include resources like water and land, shared institutions, such as health care and education, and knowledge formations from Indigenous languages to our collective cultural production of knowledge and affects via digital media platforms like Google and Facebook. The relentless pursuit of private accumulation without end directly targets the commons as sites for regenerating a broadly discredited neoliberal valorization machine. At the same time, the commons are now often invoked as a pragmatic and utopian referent to rethink modern political categories and to imagine alternative modernities, resistances, and futures within and against what Saskia Sassen has evocatively referred to as the “predatory formations” of global capitalism and elite financial concentration (Sassen, 2014). The commons have thus been positioned as an imaginative axis for thinking modes of collectivity and sustainable forms of translocal social organization beyond the limitations of capitalism as well as “actually existing” historical experiments in state socialism. This framing of the commons as both an analytical concept and political ideal has generated fascinating new discussions around the nature of contemporary subjectivity and collectivity as well as new formations of civil society, community, labor, value, identity, difference, exchange, imperialism, neocolonialism, and the primary issue we focus on in this volume—education.

The present global order imagines education, broadly conceived, as a static abstraction, an eternal feedback loop that subsumes subjectivity, desire, and imagination within a bounded range of common sense. This represents a form of education as capture. This can be seen in recent years in the development of an increasingly networked global education movement led by monopolistic corporations such as Pearson and transnational policymaking bodies like the OECD that advocate for the standardization, privatization, and human capitalization of educational institutions and practices across the world (Ball, 2012; Rizvi and Lingard, 2009). Education is here imagined as a private good, a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. While there is certainly no shortage of celebrations of difference and diversity, education is in fact here constructed as a shallow repetition of the same, mainly a staging ground for the production of docile workers, enthusiastic shopaholics, and debtors. The promise of the commons, and of an education worthy of its name, is precisely the opposite of this mode of capture. Rather than the pseudo-reality and monochromatic world of unending commodification constructed by neoliberal common sense, the commons are in fact rich in variation and possibility. Such an understanding moves us away from realizing education as a mode of enclosing and capturing difference and toward a dialectically and immanently rich conceptualization rooted in the commons as a pedagogical and political sphere. It must be understood that the fault lines and generative tensions of commoning and enclosing, by enabling or constraining ways of being, knowing, working, and relating, literally teach us. In this way, to suggest that commoning and enclosing are pedagogical relations is also to recognize that they are political relations—that is, the commons are always a divided and contested terrain. Ultimately, the dimensions of commoning and enclosing always harbor latent forms of potentiality. As with education itself and the inherent contingency of life in classrooms and lecture halls shared by countless students and educators, the commons can never be fully captured or enclosed. Rather, as the essays in this volume argue from various angles, the commons represent an open and unfinished question: a necessarily hopeful and conflicted condition of our global commonality and interrelation. We want to suggest in this brief introduction that just as the literature on commons pushes educational theory in new directions, understanding the commons as an educational concept yields new insights for enacting the global commons more broadly. Lastly, the final part of the introduction provides an overview of the volume’s themes and chapters.

Commons and Educational Enclosure

In response to various historical developments concerning shifting global power relations, capitalism, technology, environmental degradation, social movements, and Indigenous struggles for decolonization, scholars and activists have sought to develop more complex understandings of the commons as an analytical and emancipatory category. We suggest that what emerges from this literature is that the commons (plural) can be understood as encompassing the totality of shared resources including our collective institutions and the natural wealth of the planet. Simultaneously, the common (singular) represents a social ontology; that is, it is the communicative, affective, and relational foundation upon which commons are produced, circumscribed, and governed. Out of these conceptualizations, the commons has inspired wide ranging debate and become a key referent in a broad variety of contemporary struggles for social change including over educational privatization, commodification, student debt, and disinvestment in schools and universities.

Cesare Casarino has suggested that “the common is legion” (Casarino and Negri, 2008, p. 7). Its definition and lineage are complex and varied. We know from anthropology and Indigenous oral traditions that human societies have always, to some extent, depended on and utilized intricate commons relations to organize production, exchange, status relations, and social reproduction (Graeber, 2001; Polanyi, 1944). It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, that distinctly modern historical dynamics of the commons emerged. As Marx documented in Capital Volume I, the enclosures of commons in feudal Europe reflected a form of primitive accumulation. This originary violence and theft was central to the development of capitalism, both in terms of capturing commonly held land for private ends, but also for separating commoners from their direct means of subsistence, which was a key disciplinary strategy for driving communities into and accepting proletarian wage labor.

Recent historical accounts by scholars such as Peter Linebaugh (2008), Maria Mies (1998), and Silvia Federici (2004) have chronicled these processes in further detail and examined how the enclosure movements immanent to capitalist modernity transformed economic, social, political, community, and gender relations. In this sense, enclosures were intimately bound to the development of class society, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism. Similarly, David Harvey (2003) and Massimo De Angelis (2007) have alerted us to the myriad forms of enclosure immanent to neoliberal power formations as they attempt to cannibalize public resources and natural wealth, thus making primitive accumulation an ongoing feature of capitalist modernization as opposed to a temporally and spatially bounded historical phenomena. Slavoj Žižek (2009) has suggested that these enclosures of the commons today are organized around four central forms: (1) the enclosure of the natural world and the shared substance of life; (2) the enclosure of biogenetic commons; (3) the enclosure of knowledge commons including “intellectual property” and destruction of Indigenous knowledge; and (4) the enclosure of humanity itself signified through the construction of new exclusions, hierarchies, and surplus populations.

Contemporary struggles over education are deeply emblematic of processes of enclosure within the “world ecology” of global capitalism (Moore, 2015). Currently, education is increasingly captured within the technocratic managerial rationalities and ideological platforms associated with neoliberalization (Rizvi and Lingard, 2009). On the one hand, educational enclosure takes the form of human capitalization, which captures educational value within a technocratic schema aimed at transforming persons into capital “stocks” for the labor market (Lazzarato, 2012). Not only does human capitalization conceal the class and racial dynamics of education and work relations, but it ideologically manages and legitimates an emerging “post-work” landscape of economic volatility, precarity, and latent threat of mass technological obsolescence (Srnicek and Williams, 2016; Weeks, 2011). Here, self-valorization through credentialism and “lifelong learning” becomes a dividing line between the deserving and undeserving, success and mere survival in the flexible “gig” economy, and/or simply becoming one of the banished, or newly redundant and disposable, whose labor no longer matters to the system at all (Bauman, 2004). On the other hand, educational enclosure takes the form of privatization as a means of transforming K-12 and higher educational institutions and processes into potential investment opportunities and sites for profit extraction (Newfield, 2008; Saltman, 2012). In a stagnant “real” economy confronting new limits to productive investment and expansion, the educational sector, estimated at $600 billion dollars a year in the United States alone, has become a ripe source of potential value with hedge funds and Wall Street banks leading the way. This includes the global proliferation of for-profit K-12 schools and colleges; the broad intensification of corporate contracting for consulting, technology, online learning, and testing services; the financialization of higher education through student loans and tuition hikes; and efforts of grant-making bodies and corporate influence to narrow and monetize university research and knowledge production. Taken together, these enclosures of the educational commons represent more than simply free market ideology run amok, but broader attempts to transform the very substance of our relationship to teaching, learning, knowledge, and to one another (De Lissovoy, 2016; Slater, 2014).

Locating Education Within the Dialectic of Capital and Commons

In contradistinction to processes of primitive accumulation and enclosure, Linebaugh (2008) has framed a fidelity to commons as a means of achieving a more expansive conception of equality and freedom than those offered by liberalism and capitalism, which attempt to maintain a firewall between economy and polity. Alternatively for Linebaugh, commons frameworks find sustenance in the Magna Carta and its longstanding subterranean and potentially subversive influence over constitutional law. “Political and legal rights,” he argues, “can only exist on an economic foundation” (p. 6). The theory of commons, in his view, “vests all property in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit of all … both in juridical forms and in material reality” (p. 6). Linebaugh’s basic formulation of the commons as a way of thinking a new egalitarian political–economic–juridical framework tracks with a growing number of projects oriented toward rethinking theoretical categories and reigniting the radical imagination (Haiven, 2014).

Perhaps the most well known and widely discussed is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy, which has had significant impact on radical scholarship and social movements over the last two decades (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004, 2009). For Hardt and Negri, there are two components of the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Toward an Educational Commons
• 2. Commons as Actuality, Ethos, and Horizon
• 3. Reframing the Common: Race, Coloniality, and Pedagogy
• 4. Reassembling the Natural and Social Commons
• 5. Toward an Elaboration of the Pedagogical Common
• 6. Impersonal Education and the Commons
• 7. #BlackLivesMatter: Racialization, the Human, and Critical Public Pedagogies of Race
• 8. A Question of Knowledge: Radical Social Movements and Self-Education
• 9. Educational Enclosure and the Existential Commons: Settler Colonialism, Racial Capitalism, and the Problem of the Human
• 10. Common Relationality: Antiracist Solidarity, Racial Embodiment, and the Problem of Self-Possession
• 11. Education and the Civil Commons
• 12. Educating the Commons Through Cooperatively Run Schools
• 13. Big Talk in the Little City: Grassroots Resistance by and for the Common/s
• 14. Revitalizing the Common(s) in New Mexico: A Pedagogical Consideration of Socially Engaged Art
• Back Matter