A Pedagogy for Space: Teaching, Learning, and Studying in the Baltimore Rebellion

While most educational literature on space has tended to ask what spatial studies can offer education, this article works primarily to educationalize theories of space. It does so by homing in on Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space as a potentially revolutionary activity. After spending some time situating Lefebvre’s historical and theoretical analysis, it takes his understanding of the production of space as an educational problematic, and in turn seeks to develop a spatial educational theory and a pedagogy for space, the latter being the mobilization of the former. In particular, I propose to augment Lefebvre’s spatial triad of 1) spatial practice, 2) representations of space, and 3) representational spaces with an educational triad of 1) teaching, 2) learning, and 3) studying. I propose that each component needs to be held in a precarious, contingent, and dialectical relation. In order to ask more precisely after this relationship and to grasp how we might deploy this educational theory to understand and produce space, I read the theory through the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015. I contend that the Baltimore Rebellion was a struggle over the space of the city, and that it was a deeply pedagogical affair that entailed the orchestration of teaching, learning, and studying

The Aesthetics of Exodus: Virno and Lyotard on Art, Timbre, and the General Intellect

While the general intellect continues to provide a rich resource for understanding post-Fordism and for theorizing resistance, there remains a neglected aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the role that art can play in resistance based on it. This article develops the general intellect along these lines by drawing on two theorists who are rarely thought together: Paolo Virno and Jean-François Lyotard. The article begins by introducing the general intellect and Virno’s reconceptualization of it as the general or generic intellect. It then introduces a relationship between art and the general intellect by reading Virno’s theory of language, speech, and communication. From here, it goes to his theory of exodus, which is then read back through his linguistic theory in order to draw out the key role that subjective defection plays in the project. Although Virno doesn’t spend much time on art, I use this as an entry point to move to Lyotard’s writings on music and art, where I flesh out an aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the project of exodus. I focus on the artistic gesture (the “art” in/of the artwork) and especially timbre as witnesses and eruptions of the potentiality of the general intellect that can never be properly actualized. By analyzing timbre as a fugitive force that desubjectifies those gathered around music, I argue that it provides an example of the opening necessary for the subjective defection that inaugurates exodus. In this way, the aesthetic dimension added to the general intellect is the generic capacity to be affected and disindividuated

Studying like a Communist: Affect, the Party, and the Educational Limits to Capitalism

In an effort to theorize educational logics that are oppositional to capitalism, this article explores what it means to study like a communist. I begin by drawing out the tight connection between learning and capitalism, demonstrating that education is not a subset but a motor of political-economic relations. Next, I turn to the concept of study, which is being developed as an educational alternative to learning. While studying represents an educational challenge to capitalism, I argue that there are political limitations to studying for which we need to account. Specifically, studying is not in itself political, but only represents the possibility of politics. To make this claim and to address these limitations, I turn to Jodi Dean’s work on the communist Party. Dean posits the Party not as a master, director, or prophet, but as an infrastructure of affective intensity that maintains a gap in the order of things. I show that the Party is one way to organize and to defend study. Throughout the article, I illuminate the ways in which educational philosophers can contribute to political movement building by showing, developing, and refining the educational components of politics that many organizers and theorists neglect

Teaching the actuality of revolution: Aesthetics, unlearning, and the sensations of struggle

Exploring the nexus between aesthetics, pedagogy, and politics illustrates the central role education plays in reproducing injustice and inhibiting confidence in revolutionary struggle. Demonstrating how capitalism and its attendant forms of oppression are not merely cognitive but perceptual, Derek R. Ford proposes that revolutionary education demands the production of aesthetic experiences through which we sense the possibility and actuality of alternative worlds. To create such encounters, Ford develops a praxis of teaching and a pedagogy of unlearning that, in our current conjuncture, creates conditions for encountering what Jennifer Ponce de León calls “an other aesthetics.” Mapping contemporary capital as a perceptual ecology of structures, social relations, beliefs, and feelings, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Unlearning, and the Sensations of Struggle provides an extensive new set of concepts, practices, and readings for revolutionaries to better plan, enact, reflect on, and refine our organizing efforts

Marx’s inquiry and presentation: The pedagogical constellations of the Grundrisse and Capital

This paper reads Marx’s distinction between the method of inquiry and presentation as distinct and Marxist pedagogical logics that take the form of learning and studying. After articulating the differences and their current conceptualizations in educational theory, I turn to different interpretations of the Grundrisse and Capital. While I note the differences, I maintain these result from Marx’s alternation between learning and studying, to the different weights Marx gives to both. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise logics of capital, of its contradictions, and of how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t do this because no one can fully delineate and learn about capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. I show how readings of both books are products and productive of Marx’s own pedagogical constellation through their content and form of presentation. The argument is that this is a political and constellational pedagogy that’s contingent and singular rather than resolvable and unifiable

Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy

In Encountering Education, organizer and political and educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops new marxist pedagogical elements to advance the class struggle. Ford argues that the entire marxist project of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and creating a classless society entails an educational praxis that builds up disinterpellative encounters. Through an inventive reading of Marx, Althusser, Glissant, and others, they advance two dialectical pedagogical processes of inquiry and presentation, developing both--and the political relations between the two--through a range of theorists and situations. Encountering Education both illuminates the historical, political, spatial, technological, and sonic conditions of our struggle and assembles new pedagogical forms of reading, writing, listening, and learning through which we can encounter and realize an alternative social formation and, through the guidance of the Party, a new mode of production

Insurrection, Not Inclusion: Education and the Right to the City in Occupied Palestine

Critical educational theorists have recently begun to take up the notion of the ‘right to the city’ to understand and resist neoliberal attacks on education in the U.S. This process, however, has thus far not attended to the important debates taking place around what the right to the city actually is. In this paper we tease out the complexities that arise from these debates by turning to the colonization of Palestine and Palestinian resistance to colonization. We ultimately argue that the right to the city has to be conceived of in internationalist and anti-imperialist terms, lest movements for the city – particularly in the global North – result in reinforcing international relations of exploitation, oppression, and settler colonialism. We pay particular attention to the ways in which education has been central to both the occupation of and resistance in Palestine

PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION, AND SPACE: TOWARD A REVOLUTIONARY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR SPACE

Building on the work of Peter McLaren, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey, this dissertation develops a revolutionary critical pedagogy for space. I begin with a historical and theoretical survey of the roots critical pedagogy, a pedagogical orientation that is often called upon but rarely situated deeply. I then break down revolutionary critical pedagogy into seven components. I elaborate the dominant trends in the current social-political moment. I introduce two terms here, neoliberalism and the global class war. I argue that the former is a necessary but ultimately insufficient framework for understanding the present moment, and that the latter provides a necessary supplement because it looks at the global project of the restoration of capitalist class power after the circuit of socialist and national liberation struggles that transformed the globe between 1945-1979. This all entails an emphasis on the level of the global, but why is it that the global is so important, let alone space? I turn to these questions next, bringing in the “spatial turn” in education. I situate this work within the overall development of capitalism. I next turn to a particularly important spatial formation in the present: the city. Cities, I argue, are where the global contradictions of capitalism are most acute and concentrated; where capitalism is most vulnerable to disruption and overthrow. I bring in political movements and research on the “right to the city” as one way that revolutionary critical pedagogy can seize on such vulnerability. Finally, I return to the question of “pedagogy,” a move that not only spatializes educational theory but also educationalizes spatial theory. I do this by focusing in on Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space as a revolutionary activity and his spatial framework of 1) representations of space; 2) representational spaces; and 3) spatial practice. I augment this framework with an educational triad of 1) learning; 2) studying; and 3) teaching. Claiming that this triad needs to be held in a precarious and dialectic relation, I read this triad through two pedagogical examples: the schoolhouse as curriculum and the 2015 Baltimore Rebellion as praxis

The sonic aesthetics of writing: Pedagogy, timbre, and thought

While research on the educational properties of sound have opened up important pathways for research, there is a tendency to approach sound through meaning and information. This paper charts another tendency to explore sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at meaning making, thereby moving us from the process of understanding to the experience of thought itself. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with Nina Sun Eidsheim’s, which aims to delink timbre from essence and identity by showing the infinite potential of vocal timbres. While Eidsheim surely weakens the link, the pedagogy she articulates remains within the drive to produce knowledge and under the aesthetic of the beautiful. To experience timbre’s pedagogical charge requires a move to the aesthetic of the sublime. To make this move, I link together Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on writing, thinking, aesthetics, and sound, which allows expansive conception of timbre and shows the sonic dimensions of writing and thinking, through which the writer suspends their drive to know and becomes passible to the timbre (or phoné) of the word