Abstract
While power is central to the study of global politics, pedagogy is often under-recognised as a central site of power within the discipline, shaping not only what is studied but who is invited into this scholarly endeavour. We advocate for subversive pedagogies that challenge the status quo by troubling the ‘knowledge-transmission’ model of education that sees learners as passive recipients of knowledge imparted by subject experts. We articulate three key dispositions in our pedagogical practices that allow us to acknowledge how existing power relations structure our teaching and provide alternative frames for learning with our students: slowness, relationality and care. First, we identify the challenges we face working in ‘the academy at speed’, advocating a slower approach to our pedagogical practice. Second, we articulate the central features of relationality and care that can accompany a slower pedagogy, offering new possibilities for how we engage our subject and our students. We finish by tracing these elements of subversive pedagogies across the contributions to this special issue, noting how intentional subversion and attentiveness to time, relationality and care centres the power inherent in pedagogy.
Power is central to the study of global politics. This special issue focuses on the under-recognised potential of pedagogy to shape political inquiry and argues for a deeper engagement with its power and its promise. The recent (and ongoing) pandemic has dramatically reshaped our teaching and many of the changes, initially contextualised as ‘emergency teaching’, are becoming institutionalised. The contributors to this volume highlight the ways the pandemic has revealed already present tensions in higher education. They locate teaching in a broader context of hypercapitalism, where institutions increasingly frame students as ‘consumers’, relying on quantifiable metrics to evaluate teaching and its ‘outputs’. This hypercapitalisation largely either ignores or co-opts structural inequalities, such as structural racism or socio-economic inequality, drawing on Enlightenment principles of decontextualised rationality and universality as the basis for policy discussions and decision-making. Against this backdrop, the pandemic has offered a moment for global pause and reflection, revealing the status quo as made – and the potential for it to be unmade. In academic contexts, it was all but impossible not to see how the immense and unevenly distributed differences in bodies, resources, time and place affected learning. In light of this moment of global reflection, this special issue offers theoretically rich engagements with teaching as a vitally important but undervalued aspect of our roles as academics, providing theoretical and practical resources for scholars wishing to extend, deepen or challenge their pedagogical practices and commitments.
The shock of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted significant changes to pedagogical practice throughout the global academy which had to be actioned at speed: campuses were shut down, courses moved online, and blended or dual-mode learning became commonplace. For many educators, this was a dramatic pivot: we had to upskill and upskill fast. Simultaneously, we grappled with our own and our students’ physical vulnerability in the face of the health crisis as well as rising anxiety in the context of multiple intersecting crises alongside the pandemic: climate change, sharp rises in wealth inequality, persistent racial violence and housing insecurity – all of which continue to shape our reality today. Indeed, as Manivannan et al. note, the pandemic is not ‘exceptional’ in any deep sense: ‘the pandemic is novel to the century, but it should not be seen as exceptional. Rather, it is a continuum of crises of capital, of caste, of race, of climate, of gender, and of health’ (Manivannan et al., 2023: 343). In this special issue we use the phrase ‘(post)-pandemic’ to acknowledge that at the time of writing (2024), the Covid-19 pandemic is still very much ongoing, with dramatically uneven effects for different bodies depending on individuals’ and communities’ different vulnerabilities. The ‘(post)-’ of (post)-pandemic refers to the social and political decisions to reduce mandated protections in the wake of increased vaccination levels and herd immunity, but we recognise its ongoing damaging and restrictive effects on everyday life.
Many of the pedagogical changes educators were asked to make during the early stages of the pandemic were framed as ‘emergency’ measures in the face of acute crisis; however, many of these changes have now become institutionalised – in part, perhaps, opportunistically. 1 The significant pedagogical shifts of the last few years have interrupted pedagogy-as-usual and prompted many of us to think more deeply about how and why we teach the way we do and how we can ensure (post)-pandemic teaching continues to be values-aligned despite external pressures from ‘high-speed’ neoliberal institutions under stress (Ylijoki, 2013). We contend that these changes have intensified the already-pervasive emphasis on research – the directive to ‘publish, publish, publish’ – which encourages scholars to invest their time in improving quantifiable metrics like ‘impact factors’ rather than in the institutionally under-recognised work of teaching (Frueh, 2020: 2; Roa et al., 2009; Stahl, 2015: 625; Timperley and Schick, 2022: 116). Despite the pandemic prompting critical reflection on the form and purpose of teaching in higher education, we notice little shift in institutional narratives and policies around the value of research relative to teaching.
In this special issue, we have gathered contributions from global politics educators who are exploring and practising political pedagogies that subvert dominant narratives of ‘speedy’ scholarship and open space for alternative ‘slow’ pedagogies that centre embodied and relational ways of knowing (Ailwood and Ford, 2021; Berg and Seeber, 2016; Collett et al., 2018; Krystalli, 2021; Shahjahan, 2015). The collection builds on our earlier contention that pedagogy should be understood as going beyond the epistemological to the ontological, shaping not just what we know but how we learn, relate and act (Timperley and Schick, 2022). The shift to a more ontological conception of pedagogy responds to and subverts trends in the (post)-pandemic academy by challenging, for example, models of teaching that position learners as passive ‘consumers’ of knowledge that academic experts relay in monologues via online recorded lectures. Understanding pedagogy as ontological also resonates with a call for slow pedagogies, with an emphasis on creating space for deep learning marked by reflection and encounter.
This collection invites readers to critically reflect on their own pedagogical values and practices in light of the novel visions of pedagogy and learning practices outlined within each article. The pedagogies detailed are all subversive in raising challenges to the status quo, in particular to the continued dominance of Euromodern rationality and norms within higher education (Schick and Timperley, 2022). Each contribution reaches towards an understanding of education as an invitation to ‘lead out’ – seeing education as a process of guiding students ‘out’ rather than putting knowledge ‘in’ – and acknowledges the risks of doing so, noting that education ‘makes us vulnerable as we open to the other’ (Imperiale et al., 2021: 636). This vulnerability is multifaceted and situated not only in our students, but also in ourselves. Whilst vulnerability and uncertainty should be embraced both in research and in the classroom (Krystalli et al., 2023), we draw attention to the fact that most of our contributors (now) benefit from secure, tenured (or equivalent) University positions and therefore are in privileged positions that offer more room for resistance and experimentation. While subversion looks and feels different depending on context and the positionality of people involved, subversive practices can have very different – and sometimes negative – consequences for those who take them up. Precariously employed academics, for example, or those who inhabit bodies whose very presence is perceived (in overt or subtle ways) as a challenge to, or ‘at odds with’ the system (hooks, 1994: 135), may face penalties for employing the pedagogies outlined in this special issue. Structural change is needed to enable more academics to draw on the full range of pedagogical practices we detail. Normalising pedagogies of encounter, care and relationality not only recognises our students as whole persons rather than consumers, but also has the potential to enable our colleagues to embrace such moves in their own teaching. To support this change, in addition to campaigning against the casualisation of labour in the academy, we call on those in secure roles to engage in more subversion inside (and outside) the classroom, in order to move the pedagogical goal posts for those in more precarious positions.
This introduction has three parts. In Part One, we outline the temporal regimes that dominate the academy, asserting that linear and Eurocentric notions of time both explicitly and insidiously shape the ways of knowing that permeate our scholarship and pedagogy. In Part Two, we explore the concept of ‘slow’ pedagogies as subversive practices that disrupt dominant conceptions of time and make space for alternative embodied, situated, relational and care-full ways of knowing and being. In particular, we highlight the importance of relationality and care as important features of slow pedagogies that resist the speedy academy. In Part Three, we introduce the contributions to this special issue, which flesh out the pursuit of alternative, ontological conceptions of global politics pedagogy that emphasise joy, care, intimacy and encounter.
Part one: The academy at speed
A central theme of this special issue is that the dominance of a Eurocentric, linear model of decontextualised time has profoundly shaped our ways of knowing and being in the academy (Bennett and Burke, 2018: 917). This model of time is firmly situated in a capitalist worldview, whereby ‘efficiency, productivity, and excellence’ (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 52) are prized, and the ‘human’ element of academia is increasingly under pressure as institutions track individual and institutional performance and rankings. The increasing reliance on metrics to measure performance and an obsession with global institutional rankings is twinned with our universities becoming increasingly ‘hollowed-out’ as ‘academic “substance” . . . [is] routinely transformed into organisational “surface”’ (Cribb and Gewirtz, 2013: 344). As Laura Shepherd puts it, ‘contemporary academia . . . is, increasingly, a world in which we are required to measure the unmeasurable’ (Shepherd, 2021: 32). The ‘will to measure’ that is the hallmark of academic life is pervasive and inescapable: it infiltrates life within and outside our institutions with its demands for ‘constant availability’, while anxiety around our perpetual ‘lack’ dogs our everyday (Shepherd, 2021: 32).
The pandemic exacerbated this trend, simultaneously introducing more work for academics at the same time as unequally increasing domestic pressures at home. The increase in work stemmed both from moving to online and/or hybrid teaching, but also from the increase in emotional labour as students experienced the pandemic at a time when many were away from their usual support systems. As with domestic pressures at home, this emotional labour was unevenly distributed among colleagues based on gender, ethnicity and class (Górska et al., 2021; Yildirim and Eslen-Ziya, 2021). We contend that ‘lack of time’ as it is experienced in the academy is not an individual issue, even though it is often framed as such, but a structural one: ‘After all, it is our institutions, and the staff within it, which create and coordinate timing in HE’ (Bennett and Burke, 2018: 923). Though time scarcity was an issue before the pandemic, the pandemic required a global and more explicit reckoning with academics’ and students’ private lives, as educators saw into students’ homes through their computer screens, and personal lives came to be recognised as relevant to conditions of learning.
The ‘accelerating pace of work’ (Ylijoki, 2013: 252) that is a hallmark of capitalism and that characterises everyday academic experience leads to a palpable exhaustion for many (Phipps, 2010), with ‘real work’ (research and teaching) increasingly squeezed out by ‘wasted time’ (managerial accountability, funding applications) (Ylijoki, 2013: 250). Riyad Shahjahan reflects: Amid deadlines, fear of survival, and accountability measures, time becomes an important tool for perpetuating neoliberal subjectivity. As hyper extensions of colonial time, neoliberal logics operate to measure, splice and commodify time in ways that is affectively experienced by individuals navigating the academy (Shahjahan, 2015: 491).
Neoliberal pressures sit alongside the traditional, and highly gendered, academic culture of rational individualism and ‘total commitment’ that relies on non-academic partners or employees to ‘take care of the private sphere of life’ (Ylijoki, 2013: 249). A continued focus on productivity and scrutiny of outputs sits alongside a proliferation of busy work. The combination of the two – pressure to perform in conditions of time scarcity – erodes the joy of scholarship and education that attracted most of us to academia in the first place and can be profoundly isolating, separating us from meaningful relationships with our colleagues, peers, students and families as well as from ourselves as embodied beings (Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015).
Both our scholarship and our teaching are significantly shaped by the neoliberal temporal regimes that dominate the academy. As Yvonne Hartman and Sandy Darab argue, our institutions are now dominated by a ‘new learning regime’ characterised by ‘speedy pedagogy’: requiring ‘flexibility in delivery, pace and location’, with content often delivered over a compressed timeframe (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 56). They lament that students have been ‘recast as consumers’ but that they are only superficially consulted in the new modes of teaching and learning – via ‘end of session online surveys that allow any expression of dissent to be reinterpreted to maintain the status quo’ (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 56) – sidelining student voice in the pursuit of the efficient transfer of knowledge. The compression of time works against deep learning, focusing instead on the delivery of content from expert knowers to student learners with little time for reflection, critique and wider application. While this has long been a concern in the academy (e.g. see Freire, 1993; hooks, 1994), we argue that the ‘devitalised learning’ (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 56) that ensues has only become more prevalent in the (post)-pandemic teaching environment, where the imperative in many institutions has been to move to more thoroughly disembodied and transactional forms of learning via online and mixed-mode teaching.
Part two: Slowing down
In the face of capitalist high-speed imperatives, a call for slow scholarship and pedagogy is both urgent and profoundly countercultural. The contributions to this special issue rethink the taken-for-granted acceleration of academic life. The emphasis on productivity, efficiency and profit across the academy make it all too easy to defer to commonsense notions of capital’s inevitability (Agathangelou, 2021: 884). However, the pandemic’s interruption of life-as-normal has presented us with an opportunity to disrupt this narrative by pointing to alternative ways of conceptualising education. We argue that the heightened uncertainty of the global (post)-pandemic teaching environment presents academics in politics and IR with the opportunity to explore alternative possibilities and to rethink how we teach. As educators, we have had to adjust to and enact rapid changes over the past few years. These changes have happened at speed, and most of us are busier than ever, but the interruption has already prompted deep reflection from thoughtful International Relations educators navigating these changes (Krystalli, 2021; Smith and Hornsby, 2021; Szarejko, 2022) – conversations we add to here using the lens of slowness to disrupt the dominant temporal regimes that continue to dominate the academy.
Slow scholarship and slow pedagogy are not novel ideas in the academy, though their uptake remains partial and tentative, in part due to incentive structures that prioritise efficiency, quantity and outputs. Advocates for slow scholarship and pedagogy challenge these incentives, arguing that we need to rethink how we structure our time and our notions of success (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Collett et al., 2018; DeSalvo, 2014; O’Neill, 2014). Instead of conforming to notions of ‘progress’ that reify and uphold capitalist, colonial and patriarchal systems of domination and oppression, slow scholarship and pedagogy privilege quality, attentiveness and care. Slow scholarship resists ‘the will to measure’, taking a more holistic approach to life in the academy that emphasises that which cannot be measured (Shepherd, 2021: 33). 2 We see this special issue as part of a necessary movement towards slow pedagogies that seek to draw attention to how dominant conceptions of time act as an oppressive force that guides our theories and actions away from careful, ethical encounter with others. In particular, slow pedagogies seek to make space for alternative embodied, situated, relational and care-full ways of knowing and being. In times of crisis, we argue these pedagogies are even more important: it is imperative that we facilitate deep, reflective, critical and creative thinking and encounter.
The pursuit of slower pedagogies disrupts the dominant emphasis on the transfer of knowledge from expert knowers to student learners – a model that conceives of pedagogy as primarily epistemological, prioritising the accumulation of knowledge in order to better understand the world(s) in which we live, rather than as an ontological endeavour (Timperley and Schick, 2022). In the context of neoliberal temporal regimes, a focus on pedagogy as primarily about the efficient accumulation of knowledge is prioritised to the detriment of the more profound human and political work of making space for deep learning. In the place of the rapid accumulation of knowledge that is a marker of the ‘colonial science’ that dominates the Western academy, we advocate a slower cultivation of knowledge that is a marker of ‘decolonial science’ (Shilliam, 2015: 24–25) and which leaves space for unknowing (Schick, 2022). Shilliam speaks of knowledge cultivation as ‘a necessarily creative pursuit’ that is deeply embedded: ‘cultivation also infers habitation, which means that knowledge is creatively released as the practitioner enfolds her/himself in the communal matter of her/his enquiry’ (2015: 25). Similarly, bell hooks argues that our capacity for ‘free flowing’ and creative thought is reliant on intentional practices that root us in the present (2003: 167).
Making space for ‘habitation’ – for being, for the slower, more difficult work of coming-to-know (Schick, 2018) – is central to slow pedagogy. We contend that as educators and co-learners of global politics, thinking about knowledge as something to be cultivated, rather than accumulated, is crucial, facilitating deep connections as learners reflect on the personal, local and global and how the political is entwined throughout. Slowing down is also an important antidote to the technological advances that have increasingly moved our engagement with each other and the world onto screens. While technology has undoubtedly improved access to and democratised education, we also recognise that spending time on screens has reduced students’ – and our own – ability to concentrate and engage with longer texts. Slow pedagogies do not seek to orient us away from technology – nor should they – but they can prompt us to explore ways of encouraging students to spend time away from screens in order to engage in creative, ‘free flowing’ thought that can be constrained or stymied when mediated by attention-seeking digital tech.
Foregrounding relationality and care
In making space for a deeper and slower cultivation of knowledge, the contributions to this special issue centre learners holistically, as whole persons – body, mind and spirit – and as always in relation – not just to each other but also to the land on which they reside and the histories and socio-economic structures that shape their past and present. In so doing, we seek to subvert the neoliberal subjectivity that structures the academy. Part of this subversion is learning to ‘[be] at peace with “not doing” or “not being productive”, living in the present, and deprivileging the need for a result with the passage of time’ (Shahjahan, 2015: 489). Shahjahan notes that our bodies have become so divorced from our minds in modern academia that they can be understood as ‘instrumental thing[s]’ for the pursuit of productivity (Shahjahan, 2015: 494). In resisting this commodification, Shahjahan advocates reclaiming our bodies, to ‘acknowledge the interconnection between mind, body, and spirit, and contest the insertion of the body into the market’ (Shahjahan, 2015: 494). The contributions to this special issue advocate this intentional embodiment in the classroom in a variety of ways.
Relational learning practices sit alongside ritualistic and mindful ‘not do’ elements and are inextricably linked. Relational learning also resists the instrumental pursuit of particular outcomes or achievements; instead, it leaves room for uncertainty and not-knowing. It prioritises making space for encounter (Inayatullah, 2022b; Schick, 2022) – with humans and non-human entities (Zembylas, 2018) – and through those encounters promotes a deeper understanding of learners’ own positionality. Fostering micro-communities of learning marked by exchange and care is one way of ensuring that the classroom functions as a place where students more deeply meet one another. In these communities, students come to trust one another and become increasingly willing to be vulnerable with one another – to share their thoughts and experiences, and also – crucially – to listen and learn from one another, which may involve learning to tolerate discomfort (Inayatullah, 2022a; Jones, 2001; Rösch, 2020; Schick, 2020).
Relational learning is also fundamentally embodied, recognising that our bodies broadly affect ‘our relationship with the university . . . from how we conceptually approach learning and teaching to how we respond to the physical environment in which we meet each other and our students’ (Timperley, 2022: 109). The continued prevalence of the Cartesian mind/body dualism in the academy subtly prompts instructors to ignore student bodies in their teaching, instead focusing on the ‘life of the mind’. As hooks notes, ‘the erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information’ (1994: 139), yet our bodies and their experiences are central to determining what we know and how we act. Moreover, Cote-Meek argues that ignoring the ways that mind, body and spirit interact in classroom spaces ‘runs the high risk of perpetuating ongoing colonial violence and, in my view, is pedagogically unethical’ (2020: 164). Taking embodiment seriously means ‘being more responsive to students as their whole selves’ (Timperley, 2022: 112), which involves engaging students’ bodies as well as their minds. For example, Barske shows how ‘embodied learning helps to revolutionise the ways in which we approach both the content and format of our classrooms as inherently gendered and policiticized’ (2018: 239), while Shahjahan explores embodied learning practices that welcome ‘sensory . . . ways of knowing that go beyond the mind’, including music, food, drama and movement (2015: 497). In a digitally mediated classroom, the body retains its significance, despite being invisible to the instructor. Inviting students to consider their bodies as integral to their learning encourages them to understand their relationship with knowledge as not simply extractive and acquisitive, but as relational, shifting and complex.
Embodied pedagogies also highlight the importance of taking place seriously – being attentive to the land on which we teach, particularly in settler-colonial states where indigenous epistemology is regularly devalued or ignored (Timperley, 2022). Wildcat and colleagues draw attention to the settler-colonial project as one that ‘has functioned, in part, by deploying institutions of western education to undermine Indigenous intellectual development through cultural assimilation and the violent separation of Indigenous peoples from our sources of knowledge and strength – the land’ (Wildcat et al., 2014: II). In the academy, recent moves towards ‘decolonisation’ often sidestep central concerns about land dispossession from Indigenous communities (Tuck and Yang, 2012), instead focusing on teaching projects like ‘decolonising the curriculum’, which address issues of content rather than material realities (Timperley, 2023). Instead, Simpson argues for an academy that makes ‘a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge – Indigenous land’ (2014: 22). These calls for land to be a central consideration in academic life challenge assumptions of Eurocentric education systems that valorise mind over matter and assume that non-human elements such as land and place have little or no bearing on learning and knowledge. Paying attention to entangled relations between bodies, places and materialities is therefore a critical component of the relational pedagogies we highlight in this special issue.
Slow pedagogy also fosters care-full learning, where care is ‘radical and necessary’ praxis (Mountz et al., 2015: 1238) that sits at odds with the emphasis on performance and productivity that permeates the academy (Ailwood and Ford, 2021: 158, 169). Burnout and conditions of scarcity generate a sense of urgency that can prohibit care and attentiveness towards students and colleagues. Learning is a deeply human activity rooted in relationship and care for others. Actively slowing down allows us to pay attention to the ways that we often unwittingly reproduce neoliberal discourse that elevates and distances us from our students – it may take the form of grumbling about student ‘intrusions’ (emails, questions, meetings) on our ‘real’ work (research). But these intrusions are often students’ attempts at relationship (even if sometimes initially transactional) that open up possibilities for deeper connection and learning. However, centring care is emotionally demanding; as Manivannan et al (2023: 343) observe, caring can be: hard labour because of how exhausting it is most times, especially in the face of the callousness of the systems that we have decided to partake in—of which academia is one. At the same time, we have to keep reminding ourselves that caring is fundamental to our existence in this world and our commitment to it. We care because it is not just a feeling to care for someone or something; it is action and praxis.
Care-full learning therefore often requires slowing down and focusing less on efficiency or ‘outputs’ to instead spend quality, meaningful time in relationship with others and to being present ‘in the now’ (Timperley, 2024).
A sense of urgency and the valorisation of efficiency over care is not just a disposition we bring to our relationships with students, but also one that we too easily bring to relationships with colleagues as we battle overwhelm and ‘not-enoughness’. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s vision of ‘self-care as warfare’ (Ahmed, 2014), Mountz and colleagues argue that ‘cultivating space to care for ourselves, our colleagues and our students is, in fact, a political activity when we are situated in institutions that devalue and militate against such relations and practices’ (Mountz et al., 2015: 1239, emphasis ours). As Saara Särmä invites us to ponder, ‘In the highly individualised competition that academia is, how can we live beautifully taking care of each other?’ (Särmä, 2021: 37). How can we cultivate communal cultures of care that make space for connection and encounter, for holding one another through difficult times? More fundamentally, how can we collectively ‘remake the university’ to be a place where the whole person can flourish, a place marked by slowness, relationality, and care? Mountz et al. (2015: 1238) argue: [T]he “slow” in slow scholarship is not just about time, but about structures of power and inequality. This means that slow scholarship cannot just be about making individual lives better, but must also be about re-making the university. Our call for slow scholarship is therefore about cultivating caring academic cultures and processes.
Re-making the university, on this reckoning, is the deeper purpose of a counter-cultural emphasis on scholarship and pedagogies marked by relationality and care. Such an approach fundamentally rethinks what and who the university is for and how we might go about ‘[opening] spaces of possibility within the university in the everyday’ (Amsler and Amsler, 2014). 3
Part three: Subversive pedagogies in global politics
This special issue brings together contributors who are united in their contention that teaching powerfully shapes both global society and the academy and are committed to exploring approaches to (post-)pandemic teaching that go beyond the epistemological to the ontological – for them, knowledge is situated in rich context (place, bodies, relationships). Three key themes are interwoven across the issue. First, subversion, in subtle and overt forms, is at the heart of many of the contributions. It is seen in Hall and Steele’s assertion of the need for joy in teaching as a challenge to prevalent discourses of burnout and scarcity. They theorise joy as ‘a relational, and publicly embodied affect that . . . signals resistance and defiance to structures of oppression’, revealing its potency as an unexpected source of subversion. Collins and Watson also subvert institutional norms, through centring empathy in an academy that remains largely hostile to vulnerable encounter. They argue that empathy must be embedded in anti-racist pedagogies, noting this as an essential and subversive counter to an academy that ‘works to erase consciousness of our emotional and embodied selves’. Meanwhile, Motta et al. reject not only the neoliberal, colonial, patriarchal university itself, but challenge discourse that continues to centre it even in critique. They highlight the exhaustion of ‘speaking in the Master’s tongue’ and offer a vision of pedagogy as ‘world-making in flesh, spirit and relation’.
Second, themes of care and relationality run throughout the special issue. Barthwal-Datta, Krystalli and Shepherd articulate a theory of ‘pedagogy as care’, exploring the politics of care for differently situated scholars and teachers in uncaring and often hostile educational institutions. Collins and Watson detail both the promise and challenge of solidarity in the university, exploring how solidarity can ‘reveal our humanity through an exchange of knowledge, care, and service’, while simultaneously being co-opted by the neoliberal university to ‘maintain an appearance of inclusion while ticking boxes of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity”’. They share their experience attempting to create community around resistance and climate justice through a vertically integrated programme, highlighting the importance of solidarity as a means of injecting ‘radical hope’ into cynical and extractive systems. Head and Kaur also reflect this ethics of care, centring relationality and encounter in anti-racist pedagogy, while Motta and colleagues call for ‘feminist/ised and decolonising Indigenist pedagogies of world-making’ characterised by relation, intimacy and care via storytelling that centres student experiences.
Third, across these contributions there is an attentiveness to time, a central structuring feature of our academic lives. In both Scudder’s and Roberts and Ramos’ teaching philosophies, we see their calls for listening reflecting the value of slowing down and taking the time to actually attend to our students. These accounts elucidate the importance of listening as a key feature of democratic pedagogy and challenge to the still dominant knowledge-transmission model. Meanwhile, Caraccioli’s contribution interrogates the tensions arising for educators as hired labour in neoliberal institutions and their responsibilities to teach with ‘civic courage’, as articulated by Freire, recognising the power dynamics that shape and constrain knowledge production. He offers a ‘pedagogy of accountability’ as an antidote to faculty workload models that promote a ‘40-40-20’ division between research, teaching and service, asking us to reflect on the ‘exercises in bureaucratic hoop-jumping’ that focus our attention on quantifiable learning objectives rather than leaning into what pedagogy requires of us in this particular moment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the reviewers, Louise Pears and Tony Lang for their engagement with and support for this special issue. We are grateful to our wonderful colleagues and collaborators for agreeing to be part of this project, and for the rich and enriching conversations via email, workshops and Zoom meetings across time zones. We have loved learning from and alongside you all, and being inspired by your collective wisdom, generosity, and insistence that students should be at the heart of our pedagogical practices.
