The Relearning Series

Pedagogical diversions despite the rectangularisation of life

An editorial project on the ongoing techno-political transformations in (remote) educational/learning/research environments and on how to infrastructure otherwise, in more just and solidary ways.

In many ways, by many agents, on many scales and at many different rythms, we have been witnessing in the past months a general rearrangement of technosocietal structures and logi(sti)cs, accelerated by the effects of and reactions to the coronavirus pandemic. Such rearrangementes started in fact long before the pandemic, and are attributable in a longer-term view to the de- and re-centralisation processes of what has been referred to as “platform capitalism”.

As a site of emergence of these shifts, and as a precise system for the production of subjectivities and the shaping of collective processes, education is not just another example of the changes that are investing the galaxy of “the public” and its infrastructures, but a particularly well suited case for making situations of inter-agency visible, tangible and explorable.

This project could be taken as a zone of research for/of re-learning the hows, whens, wheres, whys and whos of learning situations that critically co-habit with the worldcuts of neoliberal digital orientations (platformization, IoT…) and the too common histories of painful managerial, solutionist, productivist, excellence-based and meritocratic education plannings, but also with other computed processualities and radical pedagogies.

The series, we suspect, will only comply with the roughness of unstable diversity and will only commit to the rythms marked by the mundane (as we learned from the feminist servers manifesto, we will strongly try to not apologize for not being always available). In different contexts, with different interlocutors, via different methods we are attempting to activate an ongoing insight on what it takes to practice education otherwise in the midst of the crisis of presence infused by the material cultures of quantifying existence. Or in other words: we want to engage with the need to identify a rigourous way to study breaks and continuities in what learning feels like when it takes place on the (infra)structures of turbocapitalist technocolonialism.

When things get shaken, when vibration takes place, there is always a potential to try otherwise and actively participate in the rearrangement with more politized forces. This is why we would like to channel our own situated (not as in location but as in affinity network) genealogy of playful and self-taught lowtech problematisations of the monoculture of high-tech and engage on a series of attentive textual (read-write) exercises to attempt a praxis of staying with pedagogical complexity while collecting existing evidences of widening possibility and collectively fabricating potentia.

(Forthcoming) Series elements:

Affinity network:

For contributions to the series or interlocutions of any sort, please get in touch!