Contagious Education

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies. Rather than accepting these technologies as possibilities to improve, reform, or more efficiently practice education, this intra-view discusses how these technologies portend possibilities to escape education. The intra-view revolves around Luciana Parisi’s idea of “digital contagions” and participants muse about the contagious opportunities to escape the biopolitical, colonial, and historical rationalities that contemporary education now uses to govern populations in ways that are automated, modulated, and wearable

Beyond a Single World: Pedagogy and Relating in Difference

The central notion of my analysis is that the relational values that are privileged by the feminine, if properly addressed in school, could foster a more inclusive and embodied way of addressing the fundamentally masculine origin of knowledge, curriculum planning as well as daily school rituals and cultures. For this reason I evoke the horizon of sense as captured by Irigaray in her two-ness of the world to designate a positive place for feminine subjectivity in the relational economy of the you and I, her and him. The economy of the placenta is evoked as a new form of connectedness enfolding a new kind of communication in a pedagogical interaction - where multiplicities and differences are privileged over sameness. ‘Touch’ is given primacy in the formation of a dialogue that does not appropriate but instead evokes the sharing of a desire in the two-ness of the world

Pedagogy Without Bodies

Educational theory today seems to be premised on a distributive thought; either on students’ bodies perceived as unified entities, as self-maintaining and ongoing forms that can be recognized and represented, or as with some post-humanist and new materialist accounts, as just this one entity, emerging and interconnected among a myriad of others in a world, understood as one organic and reproductive whole. This raises certain problems and certain questions, the solution of which presents us with specific tasks of thinking about curriculum planning, as well as ethics and politics in education. What is pursued is either a universal subject and his human right to be educated and skilled well enough to live well and to be a good and productive citizen (thus there ought to be generalizable and standardized elements of curriculum); or, there is a notion that we can only know subjects in their individuated and socially determined expressions, and thus curriculum is integrated as much as possible (bestowing individual differences in ability and access according to diverse social contexts), as is evident by the upsurge in individuated and differentiated learning plans tailored to each individual student. I argue that a different ethics is needed for the future of education and pedagogy if we are to think multiplicities beyond the world of man. By understanding life as virtual, it is possible to conceive of a pedagogy without bodies. Pedagogy without bodies as a concept (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) would be an orientation for educational thought where we would no longer begin with the image of a living, active, corporeal body, but would, following Claire Colebrook (2011), consider intensive forces that unfold life differently from that of the productive human. Pedagogy without bodies as a concept alludes to the incorporeal and material composition of sense which, I believe, is an important orientation for thinking philosophy of education, and curriculum in terms of dispersed, intensive and inhuman forces and processes intricate to any singular pedagogical event and its readability