Radical Pedagogies and the Troubles of Engagement

“Engage! … and things will be fine.”

The language of engagement and engaged practices is gaining traction in times of intersecting crises. Arts and the humanities are interpellated as the last resort where other disciplines and approaches have failed. The call to art and the humanities goes hand in hand with the impetus to innovate, create, and deviate from the day-to-day conduct of politics and governance. The promise and hope conferred to engagement often obscures its actual terms and afterlives. Engaging art and the humanities as remedy for social, environmental or political disarray in this way turns them into a quasi-magical weapon against inevitable demise. 

This lecture series inquires the troubles of engagement in radical pedagogies inside and outside academia. It asks what it means to learn and unlearn habits of making and thinking in times of crisis. Engagement is a janus-headed concept: on the one hand institutions promote it as a solution proposing “adapted” or “flexible” pedagogies, on the other hand it concerns forms of care, concern, and involvement that exceeds solutionism. Engagement, in this sense, is both a burden and a necessity—a site of experiment, relation, and practice.

The series convenes six conversational pairings of practitioners doing radical pedagogies inside and outside academic institutions. Together, these conversations aim to open up what can be done with the call for engagement: how to resist the solutionist framework of white governance, and how to build alliances between communities of practitioners of radical pedagogies in a minor key. 

Speakers and Dates: 

Parapedagogies of Resistance (November 14)
Erin Manning + Fumi Okiji

Rhythmic Pedagogies (December 12)
Josephine Zwaan + Vernon Chatlein

Sustainable Pedagogies (Feb. 6)
Sophie van Balen + Lisa Doeland

Decolonial Pedagogies (March 13)
Flavia Meireles + Rosalba Icaza Garza

Mediated Pedagogies (April 24)
Sofia Boschat-Thorez + Maxime Hackermann

Commoning Pedagogies (May 15)
James Parnell +  Lionel Deul

Full description of the program and link to the lectures: https://www.eur.nl/en/esphil/radical-pedagogies-and-troubles-engagement

The event is co-hosted by the Erasmus School of Philosophy and the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL), organised by Christoph Brunner and Claire Tio.