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

Subjectivity in the folds : education, media practices, and environmental activism amongst more-than-human pleats

This study examines everyday media practices in environmental movements, activism campaigns, claims to education, and their relation to subjectification through various contortions of the verb ‘fold.’ Thinking with different types of folds (e.g., pleats, inflections, twists), it proposes concepts for investigating subjectification as a series of shifting spatial and temporal arrangements between a) environmental non-governmental organizations’ (ENGOs) campaigns and their educational intentions, b) residents’ media practices in ecological conflicts, and c) more-than-human forces and events of the Anthropocene. The project reconsiders media practices and environmental movement learning in ecologically perturbed times through the thought of Gilles Deleuze (1988, 1993), especially his concept of ‘the fold’ and its quadripartite architecture of subjectivity, comprising folds of knowledge, matter, force, and ‘the outside’ or death/extinction. I argue that subjectivity is produced through media and knowledge practices in ecological conflicts—not as a ‘being’ or the bounded contours of a human entity, but as an event and a process of folding inflected by more-than-human pleats. Situated within darker hues of ecological thought, this study engages with and problematizes the media practices of 24 residents in anti-oil pipeline movements in British Columbia, Canada (e.g., tracking online petitions, following (or not) ENGOs’ social media feeds, engaging in online news comments, photographing themselves at protests, writing letters to editors), and their ambivalent encounters with activism campaigns, digital strategies, and especially claims to knowledge and education made by six ENGOs in attempts to contrive ‘political subjects.’ The collection of chapters invites a textured and geometric reading, privileging proliferation over coherence. Subjectivity is folded and refolded in relation to media practices and education through a fieldwork in textures: a) an approach to research for thinking and ‘experimenting’ with subjectivity as concomitantly folded in multiple ways, and b) a mode of inquiry that examines how concepts and fieldwork inflect each other. I develop ‘folded concepts’ emerging from methodological conundrums, mapping the limitations of human thought, conflicting claims to education, media practices, and the more-than-human forces that affect them. Moving away from effects or what campaigns represent, the study focuses on what campaigns and practices do and affect.Education, Faculty ofGraduat

Writing in Cramped Spaces

This conceptual paper focuses on writing in the cramped spaces of the thousand disciplinary plateaus. It inquires into the cramped conditions that enable the production of a new language through spacing-making. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) use of the phrase ‘cramped spaces’ in their discussion on Franz Kafka’s minor literature, this paper offers ways to think about writing in spatial terms. It suggests that post-qualitative writing that tries to dislocate from disciplinary plateaus, moves beyond drawing on multiple disciplines, towards disciplinary deterritorializations, diagramming, and rummaging. The paper draws on philosophy, literature, medicine, geography, ecology, and art, to draw a series of lines with which to think about writing in cramped spaces

Writing in Cramped Spaces

This conceptual paper focuses on writing in the cramped spaces of the thousand disciplinary plateaus. It inquires into the cramped conditions that enable the production of a new language through spacing-making. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) use of the phrase ‘cramped spaces’ in their discussion on Franz Kafka’s minor literature, this paper offers ways to think about writing in spatial terms. It suggests that post-qualitative writing that tries to dislocate from disciplinary plateaus, moves beyond drawing on multiple disciplines, towards disciplinary deterritorializations, diagramming, and rummaging. The paper draws on philosophy, literature, medicine, geography, ecology, and art, to draw a series of lines with which to think about writing in cramped spaces.</p