Reflexivity, as internal conversation, enables autistic university graduates to develop agency, recognise structural influences, and ultimately shape their life projects. This study uses a biographical-narrative methodology to develop polyphonic life histories which uncover the dialogic and the reflexive processes autistic graduates engage in alongside their support networks and researchers. In total, three autistic graduates from Spanish universities participated in individual semi-structured interviews as well as dyadic interviews with 11 supporters. These were then supplemented with written narratives, and a researcher’s diary. The study draws on Margaret Archer to offer a theorised perspective on how reflexivity mediates structural constraints and enablements in their university experiences positioning autistic graduates as active agents in their own narratives. At a methodological level, researchers extend the use of reflexivity to acknowledge their own reflexive standpoints in the interpretive process and use these – alongside reflections from the graduates - to problematise hierarchical epistemic structures in the field of autism research.
This paper reckons with the educator's role in modern education systems by using the ideas of complicity and resistance to explore the challenge of working equitably within inequitable systems. I argue that viewing complicity and resistance on a spectrum and actions in their wider social and political context helps us to understand, as educators, not only our own complicity with the oppression that modern educational systems generate but also the degree to which we are constrained in our own actions. Further, I suggest that educators work within constraints that make an individualistic view of subjectification as an educational purpose impossible and that pursuit of this may not, in turn, serve students well when they encounter constraints to freedom outside the classroom. Given this, I suggest that it is still possible to practice a form of pastoral pedagogy that prioritises engagement with the individual and uses a non-coercive approach to support autonomy for students but that this form of pedagogy additionally allows for consideration of the constraints the teacher and the student may be subject to. I use the film Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna, 1964) as a thinking tool for this discussion and suggest that engaging with the film allows for a form of thinking aloud on the topic of complicity, resistance and pastoral pedagogy by presenting a 'meaningful world' that is not reducible to simple classification nor is purely illustrative (Gibbs, 2017a; Gibbs, 2017b, p278). Encountering, via film, a completely new world and considering the parallels with more familiar educational contexts, allows for a consideration of wider ethical questions about education and the role of educators (Laugier, 2021).
Bella, in Gray's 1992 novel Poor Things, fell into the Clyde attempting to end her life. She was pulled up from the Thames in Lanthimos' 2023 film adaptation. Bella can be argued to represent Scottish Nationalism, but resetting the film omits this, recasting the source to be more palatable to a global audience. Similarly, Scottish education has been recast over centuries. This paper will problematise the drive to distinguish Scottish education from English, and the conflict between policy designed to play well on the local and international stages in the "global education race" (Sellar et al., 2017). Using a body schema, the paper is introduced via the Extremities: necessary information about the texts, Derrida's hauntology (Derrida, 1994) and Lacan's signifiers (Jacques Lacan, 2007), and how these are used to grasp at the argument being presented. The Limbs looks at Scotland's first steps towards maturation through exploring the power dynamics of key education acts and the location of the Scotch Education Department. The Throat explores language's importance and the impact of Scotland's assimilation of English on its indigenous languages and their connections to Education. The Mind looks at Scottish education in present day in which, after successfully fighting for their own parliament, education has become a top priority, aiming to recreate a cherished (and mythologised) system, although it would appear that it finds itself dredging many of its foundational ideas from the Thames, or perhaps the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the Whole concludes the piece. As Poor Things is a rewriting of Frankenstein, Scotland's current education system is equally too a mishmash of recast myths, attempted fixes for past hauntings, and attempts to step into modernity. This work uses the comparison of the film and novel to generate fresh insights into Scottish Educational policy.
This article outlines, by means of a critique of film criticism, the processes of self-formation and subject-formation as affected by unconscious education. The basic definition of the unconscious used is: something that happens to someone without them being consciously aware of it happening, unless their attention to it is actively drawn. This is a functional definition used to develop a critical argument specific to the filmic and theoretical texts used in the article and is not an attempt to capture other definitions of the unconscious within its scope except where explicitly mentioned. While Freud is engaged indirectly through more recently theoretical work, including my own, the deep relationship to Freud's thought is beyond the scope of this article and is therefore - consciously - only gestured towards. Unconscious education, as defined in the context of this article, is as much about what in our experience might be out of focus, which, in aural terms might be heard without listening. As such, this article charts a theoretical and practical movement from hearing to listening and passive inattention to active attention in the context of film and film criticism, with a specific focus on film music. This specific focus, though, is principally a means of illustrating (note the visual metaphors) a theoretical position that can be considered across the full range of educational experiences and practices, including research and criticism.
In this introduction to the special issue on "Utopias and Science Fictions in Education Theory and Philosophy", we explore the points of departure that brought these contributions together, including our Summer School in the coastal town of Gdynia (generously supported by PESGB and the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk) where participants were given the opportunity to enact in real time utopian and speculative modes of thinking and writing on the present state of education. The Summer School was a culmination of several years of thinking together about the role, the actuality, or indeed the (im)possibility of utopias and science fictions in theorising about education, which we briefly summarise in the text. This special issue showcases how science fiction and educational theory, when placed in dialogue, can reanimate the utopian dimension of education. By experimenting with axioms, reassembling everyday utopias, and engaging in speculative fabulation, the essays collected here suggest that utopia remains vital for charting the horizons of educational thought. Within these horizons, utopian thought may no longer appear as the grand projection of modernity but persist as practices and forms of thinking and theory production, offering, just like science fiction, a mode of imagination and a way of inhabiting the present otherwise. To affirm this is not to indulge in mere fantasy, but to recognize that education itself consists in and educational theory could become an invitation to think beyond what is.
The increased use of student experience survey questionnaires in higher education such as NSSE (USA), AUSSE (AU), ETLQ (UK), and NSS (UK), can be seen as vital parts of an ongoing transition towards a subtle neoliberal governance that works through institutions' self-correction in relation to politically defined indicators. Recently new automated feedback functions that invite students to compare their responses to a numerical average have been added to some of these survey questionnaires, which indicates that the survey questionnaires are also aiming at cognitive or behavioral change among students. However, the question of whether the survey questionnaires also have performative effects on the students has gained only little attention in research. Addressing this gap, the article presents a small qualitative interview study focusing on students in Finland and Denmark and their encounter with the student survey questionnaires of their country: HowULearn (FI) and the Learning Barometer (DK). The study unfolds within an actor-network-theoretic framework in which survey questionnaire technologies are conceptualised as actors that carry particular normativities with them, yet open to interpretation and mediation by students and others. While previous research suggests that the student survey questionnaires represent a political appropriation of students' voices, the study shows that complex distributed negotiations play out in students' encounters with the survey questionnaires. The findings have implications for how we understand the performative effects of student experience survey questionnaires in terms of student conduct.
This special issue examines education and resistance in the context of the climate emergency, foregrounding the interconnected roles of affect, aesthetics, and conflict. Emerging from the 6th symposium of the Studies in Conflict, Culture, and the Political in Education (SCAPE) research network, convened in 2023 at Maynooth University (Ireland), the collection comprises seven articles and one provocation essay, each seeking to respond to the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change. The contributions situate education within the material, political, and existential conditions produced by climatic and ecological disruption, while critically engaging the contested interpretations through which this crisis and its emergency are understood in a polarized world. Rather than treating the climate emergency as a singular or consensual object of concern, the issue foregrounds dissensus, relationality, and aesthetics as constitutive dimensions of educational thought and practice. Conflict is thus approached not as a problem to be resolved but as a potential generative force within education, requiring attention to sensory-affective, embodied-aesthetic, and more-than-human relations. A unifying thread across the contributions is a reworking of resistance as a pedagogical practice grounded in attentiveness and gentleness, oriented against hegemonic powers and sensitive to the indeterminacy and relationality that characterizes subjectivity. Collectively, the intellectual engagements of this issue offer plural perspectives on how education might cultivate new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and sharing worlds under conditions of ecological precarity, opening pedagogical space for uncertainty, dissensus, and renewed judgment.
This article outlines the concept of tender public pedagogy, which refers to the educationally saturated care for a fragile common good: the commonality shared by humans and non-human others. The deficit of such spaces is experienced as a planetary catastrophe. Drawing on the thoughts of Olga Tokarczuk, the article presents the concept of the fourth-person narrator as foundational for tender public pedagogy. This pedagogy is outlined through four antecedents. The central question is not what such pedagogy is, but under what circumstances it can occur. Methodologically, the text unfolds as a pedagogical story about a regenerative and more sustainable world, theorized in line with a non-anthropocentric reconstruction of Norbert Elias' relationism and his concept of figurations. Here, tenderness is seen as a key tool of regenerative transition, and is related to an ontology of the fragment and Fran & ccedil;ois Jullien's concept of gap (& eacute;cart) that doubles as a bridge.
In this meditation, I will challenge my own inability to take in and act on the seriousness of the situation of today's world: Its planetary crises affecting all life. I do so by addressing the violence and domination inscribed in me through being schooled in the western capitalist culture in which I live. A culture in which perfection is the end goal of everything. I challenge this ego of perfection, by embracing the un-harmonizable plant-ness of life and joining the joint struggles against eco-based as well as gender-based violence.
What kind of worlds do people live in and how do these worlds impact on education's capacity for responding to the climate emergency? As Bruno Latour (2017, 2018) puts it in his work, this is not an effect of simply seeing 'the world' from different, conflicting vantage points, rather it is that we indeed inhabit different worlds: for some the world is where land, resources, and animals are for human use and subject to human value; for others the world is a place of profound interconnection and spirit with other living beings and non-living entities. Beginning with a critique of how 'the' world has been utilised in education research, I then discuss 'worlding' as an educational practice which recognises that we just do not live in the world, or even with the world, but that we are of worlds, simultaneously constituting and being constituted by them.
Education research has been increasingly concerned about the role of instrumentalism in defining education. Within the context of the climate emergency, conceiving of education instrumentally positions educated subjects as actors capable of minimising the effects of climate change. This article is not critical of actions that mitigate the climate emergency. However, within the research that resists the instrumentalization of education, the climate emergency requires a status different from its role as an end that orients the content and practices of education. By asking what is educational about the climate emergency, this article focuses on the emergence rather than the urgency of climate change as a way for education to carry on as the climate emergency continues to present unforeseen challenges of living together. The article concludes with the irreducibility of conflict to an emergent understanding of the educational, a feature that commits education to an incomplete and porous world.
The paper argues that the climate crisis is a political issue, not merely a scientific issue, and that agonistic democratic theory (Mouffe) remains helpful to underpin political education. It offers three elaborations that support this argument. The first is on how the category of the "enemy" in Mouffe's work does or does not play a role in political education. The second addresses the misinterpretation of agonistic political theory as requiring the active fostering of conflict. The third elaboration is on how antagonism can be transformed into agonism. On this point, the paper argues that agonistic political education involves the uncoercive rearrangement of the desire (Spivak) to eradicate an enemy into the desire to contest a political adversary in democratic struggle. It concludes by discussing the climate crisis as a frontier of struggle that ought to play a prominent role in political education today, and that illustrates the viability of agonistic democratic education.
The overall purpose of this article is to bring the notion of ritual to bear on the corporeal, often non-verbal, and sensory gestures and ways of doing things that are deeply woven into the liturgies and choreographies of schools and classrooms, but that are given marginalized attention in educational research. Drawing on interdisciplinary ritual theory that makes a distinction between two different ways of thinking about ritualized action – the modus of the subjunctive and the modus of sincerity (Seligman et al.) – the argument is made that ritual like practices can enact a way of teaching that, in contrast to the commonly held view that rituals repeat and preserve the status quo, invites transformation and change. Methodologically, the article combines theoretical reflection with analysis of empirical data and uses examples from Education for Sustainable Development teaching (ESD) as springboard for its inquiry into the pedagogical potential of classroom ritualization. The article is divided into three parts. The first part offers a background to previous research on ritual in philosophy of education. The second part introduces the empirical material as well as the theoretical perspective, and the third part sketches the contours of what teaching in the modus of subjunctive could imply, particularly in the face of challenging and sometimes polarizing issues like climate change. The article concludes by suggesting that teaching in the modus of the subjunctive asks of teachers and educators to give to the new generation a teaching that not only focuses on facts and figures but that also takes into consideration the imaginative quality of education.
This article explores how narrative-based pedagogies can offer ways of thinking with absence amid the complex realities of extinction in the Anthropocene. It focuses on fabulatory forms of retelling—narratives in which entangled destinies bind humans and more-than-humans, and where death is not passively admitted or rendered silent. The central question posed is: How can the memory of the departed ones remain alive in the shadow of extinction? I argue that to engage meaningfully with memory in these times requires soliciting the dynamic presence of the dead, which involves listening to how they call upon the living and teach through their invitation to respond. To do so, I draw on Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret to address how the disappearance of countless living beings can influence our lives after their death, and how these absences can become sites of learning, guiding us toward the possibility of more just multispecies futures. This demands a shift in how death is understood, not merely as a definite closure, but as an ethical invitation to continuity, to “making-memory with ” the dead in ways that counteract forgetfulness and rekindle connection in the face of amnesia. Crucially, this reimagining of pedagogical encounters with the dead has significant implications for death education grounded in ecological justice. It requires an educational praxis that recognizes remembrance as a political act, one that resists the erasure of marginalised lives, honours multispecies death, and fosters solidarity across boundaries of time, species, and modes of being. By learning to live with these absences and from them, educators can create spaces where loss becomes a generative force for collective response-ability, critical inquiry, and transformative justice.
The importance of cultivating classroom environments where students feel physically and emotionally safe and can express themselves and their ideas freely is well documented in educational research. However, in times of democratic and ecological turmoil, creating classroom environments that are sufficiently open and supportive when addressing value conflicts or difficult ethical and existential issues presents significant challenges. This article proposes an educational language that addresses the affective, dissonant, and embodied dimensions of classroom life. To this end, the article unfolds as a philosophical argument in three parts. First, Bonnie Honig’s political notion of “holding environments” is read as a pedagogical notion, highlighting how such classroom environments can bring students with different values and affective attachments together around “public things” that are entangled in sustainability issues. Second, the pedagogical notion of holding environments is put to the test by a scene from the empirical classroom. Drawing on Rita Felski and Martin Heidegger, the concept of “attunement through atmosphere” (German Stimmung ) is thirdly introduced as a way of analyzing the affective and sensory micro landscape of the “good enough” open and supportive classroom environment. By way of conclusion, it is argued that education for sustainability is as much about knowledge acquisition and developing skills, as about world-disclosure and finding one’s place in the planetary situation we are in.
This conceptual paper brings together scholarship on climate coloniality and affective injustice to propose a reframing of climate justice education (CJE) that foregrounds the affective dimension of the climate crisis. In particular, the paper introduces the concept of affective climate injustice to capture how climate change not only devastates environments and livelihoods but also inflicts profound emotional harm. Emotions such as grief, rage, and exhaustion are unequally distributed and often delegitimized, particularly when voiced by marginalized communities, including Indigenous peoples, racialized groups, and those in the Global South. By advancing the notion of affective climate injustice as an analytic lens, the paper suggests that CJE can more fully acknowledge these asymmetries and cultivate practices of care and relationality. Such an approach offers alternative pathways for advancing climate justice, especially in contexts where direct discourses are under attack. The paper highlights the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this framework for reimagining CJE.
This paper explores the role of counterfactual thought in educational theory by proposing a heuristic that distinguishes between two modes: ‘As if’ and ‘What if’. We begin by grounding the discussion in philosophical debates on language, imagination, and fictionality, before introducing the heuristic, which situates these modes within a broader typology of relations to reality. We then elaborate two exemplary figurations – axioms for ‘As if’ and Science Fiction for ‘What if’ – to demonstrate how counterfactual thinking operates in educational theory and as educational theory. A final discussion assesses the heuristic’s analytical, clarificatory, and generative value. We conclude that educational theory is inherently imaginative and that counterfactual modes of thought are essential to its capacity to critique the present and envision alternative futures.
In this paper I argue that the ways that we teach about plants are limited by long standing conceptions of them as insensitive and noncommunicative. Science can provide insights from research into plants, however, the extent of the change to our thinking that would be needed to address this limitation can best be brough about through more creative means. I suggest that the deep-seated and long-established misconceptions of plants can be effectively addressed through Storytelling. I explore the idea that humans’ relationship with plants can be understood as colonization, and look to Science Fiction, finding an example of this in The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham. Storytelling and specifically the speculative narratives of Science Fiction are argued to offer us a means of changing our minds about plants, whilst also offering approaches to how to teach and learn about them differently. Stories are proposed as a tool for reconsidering entrenched values and beliefs, offering a means of challenging established ways of thinking about plants, and releasing us to consider why how we teach about plants matters – not just for education, but for our future.
This article brings Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy to critically examine the film's pedagogical implications. At the surface, the film follows a young boy's (Ahmad) apparently simple quest to return a classmate's notebook. This quest turns into a journey that evolves into a quietly powerful confrontation with the structures of institutional authority. Drawing on Levinas's notion of subjectivity as inherently grounded in responsibility for the Other, the film is interpreted as staging an ethical awakening that is not embraced freely, but placed upon the subject, disrupting the totalizing logic of obedience entrenched in familial and educational systems. We argue that Ahmad's refusal to yield to these systems' demands is not an act of childish obstinacy, but rather a subtle yet subversive challenge to the pedagogical machinery that not only denies individuality, but is essentially driven by homogeneity. By analyzing the dynamics between anxiety, responsibility and disobedience, this article argues that the film presents a poetic yet profound critique of education as a site of normalization, while simultaneously offering a model of ethical subjectivity constituted through substitution, and failure. The failure to "achieve" the aim - Ahmad never finds the friend's house - is understood as the condition for a non-utilitarian ethics.
How and where can one find hope amid the blasted landscape of higher education? It has been 30 years since Bill Readings declared the university "in ruins" and things can scarcely be said to have improved since then. Some place their hope in trying to recover and rebuild "the public university". This paper takes a different tack. Rather than considering higher education "in crisis" (from which recovery might be possible), the paper invites us to consider the post-apocalyptic academy (the end of a world). A post-apocalyptic lens has heuristic value because it frees the imagination from the constraints imposed by a romantic attachment to the past and provides a position from which to look at ourselves anew. Taking inspiration from Jonathan Lear's study of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, and the "radical hope" that enabled Coups to lead his people through a process of cultural collapse, the paper explores what it might mean to adopt a stance of radical hope in the face of the collapse of purpose and meaning within the contemporary academy. Arguing for the importance of reading radical hope in conjunction with Fredric Jameson's "anti-anti-utopianism", the paper offers some thoughts on what an anti-anti-utopian radical hope might look like and call on us to do. These are illustrated through vignettes reflecting on articulations of hope to be found within a number of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Some may regard the hope emerging from this discussion a little "thin". It may also, however, be the best hope we have.
