This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative (...) and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not. (shrink)

This paper explores comedy as a queer pedagogical form that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating ‘form’ less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of formation that positions these in dynamic relation to the wider context in which comedies are encountered, we mobilise the idea of queer pedagogical forms to capture how comedy can foster new modes of thinking about and embodying queerness for, and (...) with, audiences. Drawing on specific examples from Schitt’s Creek and Derry Girls, we document the potential of specific comedic modalities (e.g. irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and slapstick) to foster alternative representations of queerness, in which normative tropes are poked fun at, problematised, and reimagined. Through these examples, we demonstrate how comedies can enable us to ‘laugh ourselves out of the closets’ we live by, feel, navigate, and embody. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote lecture. Taking its point of departure in a befriended support of his argument, the paper begins in the mood of affirmation as a form of critique. Thereafter it engages, first, with what it reads as a slightly retrotopian approach to digitalization in the paper. Second, it brings to attention that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration, which Masschelein suggests, always involves a moment of return or repetition. The question is asked what (...) form the gesture of retrieving inherited pedagogical forms from the past takes in Masschelein’s proposal, and it is suggested that such retrieving is a work of constant translation. Third, a comment is made about the advocating of orature, issuing the reminder that on-campus education usually comes without noise reduction, that is, it requires reflection also on the discord that is calibrated in and through our voices. (shrink)