Shared by Alex Berry
How might common worlding pedagogies live as elsewhere in the now? Stengers (2015) proposes that sedimented categories of theory and action must be radically reconfigured if humans are to avoid the appropriation of possibility into pre-existing frames. Yet, her call to ‘repopulate the desert’ of human imaginaries is coupled with a warning – that capitalism has entrepreneurial ways of benefitting from every situation. In the tireless pursuit of accumulation, a neoliberal mirage of realized human growth simultaneously fuels economic expansion and destroys prospective life outside capitalist regimes. Within this logic, pedagogy lies between the physical and symbolic pursuit of vertical futures, not only within the actualized layers of schooling, but also virtually through subjectivities that speak from the imaginary of a distant self, a mythic destination that taunts from a few steps ahead.
If common worlding pedagogies are acts of future-making, where do they live? Perhaps common worlds pedagogies might be imagined as tentative occasions of thought – arising from horizontal elsewheres, always hesitant to getting it right, or finding a ‘there’.
Photo by Aja Papp
Stengers, I. (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Luneburg, Germany: Open Humanities Press.
These are really nice thoughts Alex. Thanks for this microblog and for bringing Stengers into the conversations.
I understand your ‘tentative occasions of thought’ as not wanting to pin down a certain set of ‘methods’ that could be colonised by capitalism into ‘best practice’, but embodied, situated, place-responsive practices are surely very important to common worlding pedagogies? So do you mean thought as thought-in-motion?
In warmth (and hundred degree heat today in Naarm Melbourne!)
Alicia