Teaching Beyond Dread

Alexander Means, Yuko Ida, Matthew Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040321034
• Topic: Education

This book explores how teaching endures in the age of pervasive dread. It asks: How does teaching refuse and counter dread's grip? What new stories of teaching might be told beyond the culture of dread?

Dread is the prevailing mood of this era. Dread is an affliction of minds, bodies, and social life. Climate chaos, spiraling inequality, loss of community, cynicism, and escalating attacks on public schools, universities, and educators are all contribute to pervasive dread. This book explores the persistence of teaching in this era of dread. The chapters examine the context of teaching in a time of dread and touch upon different valences of race and pedagogy, as well as pedagogy in relation to global crises of capitalism, technology, and ecology. Taken together, they explore how teaching endures over dread and examine how teaching might be rethought as a creative force for imagination over fatalism, reciprocity over exploitation, thought over fundamentalism, belonging over atomization, love over nihilism, mutuality over narcissism, care over hatred, joy over despair, democracy over fascism, and hope over dread.

This thought-provoking volume will be a key resource for educators, scholars, artists, and activists alike. It was originally published as a special issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: teaching beyond dread
• 1 Beyond a world of dread: a conversation with David Theo Goldberg
• 2 Higher education as the frontline of democracy: the case against Florida House Bill 233, anti-shielding/intellectual viewpoint diversity/student recording legislative act
• 3 Neoliberal dread and the persistence of teaching
• 4 Fascist politics and the dread of white supremacy in the age of disconnections
• 5 “This is what we wanted to learn”: anti-racist and anti-colonial education with 1st gen Korean American seniors in a time of Asian hate and racialized dread
• 6 Deconstructing dread: teaching through Black histories
• 7 Fugitive pedagogies of dread for radical futurity: affective, ontological, and political implications
• 8 Dread and the automation of education: from algorithmic anxiety to a new sensibility
• 9 From inevitable disaster to ineradicable possibility: critical pedagogies of ecocide, educational privatization, and new technology
• 10 Thinking and teaching beyond the terror of capitalist reason
• 11 danSing for another world: memory a/r/t/s work as creative response
• 12 Hopelessly joyful in dreadful times
• Index