SELECTED WRITINGS
EDITED Books
Empire and Education (Routledge, 2023)
Edited By Alexander J. Means, Amy N. Sojot, Yuko Ida, Manca Sustarsic
Empire is in a state of emergency. A global pandemic and an ongoing secular crisis of capitalism, ecological instability, racism and ethnic conflict, geopolitical tensions, and specters of war all haunt the global order. Education performs a key role in producing the subjective capacities that nourish Empire within its current neoliberal form. Simultaneously, education and pedagogy contain creative elements, presenting an immanent surplus that always exceeds incorporation. Empire and Education builds on the influential work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to examine the role of education and pedagogy in the making and unmaking of Empire within our historical conjuncture. The essays included in the book, which include an interview with Michael Hardt, mobilize concepts of biopolitics, swarm intelligence, revolution, love, stupidity, the body, multitude, networked solidarity, and the common to imagine pedagogical possibilities for collective life beyond Empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Journal articles
Interrupting Empire: Playing with concealment and pedagogy in the meme ‘For the better, right?’
Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 10(2), 1-17. Special issue: Star Wars: A New Hope for Visual Pedagogies in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. (2025)
‘For the better, right?’ is a Star Wars meme that depicts a scene from Episode II—Attack of the Clones. Although the scene and dialogue never occur in the actual film, the meme provides a concise fourteen-word analysis of how Empire conceals itself. Using postfoundational inquiry, this article examines the meme’s pedagogy through Brian Massumi’s work on play in relation to politics and affect. Concealment and interruption are identified as two characteristics of these relations. Author-created iterations of the meme demonstrate how play, as theorized by Massumi, can rework these tactics of concealment and interruption, enabling them to imagine alternative approaches to resisting Empire: a visual pedagogy that does not replicate its systems or foundational logics.
Disciplining subjectivities and sensing time in a US university.
Journal of Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 1(6), 155–177. Special issue: Foucault and Contemporary Theory in Higher Education: New Approaches, Theories, and Conditions of Possibility. (2024)
Informed by new materialism as well as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons, this article is a philosophical investigation of the feelings of time upon disciplined bodies and subjectivities in the university. Drawing from the author’s experience while participating in an anomalous reading group, this mode of inquiry is reflective and interpretive, mirroring the personal nature of sensation. The article first turns to Foucault’s analysis of how time disciplines the subject, followed by a discussion of the university’s perceptions of time. Finally, a sense of “useless” time is explored in terms of the undercommons to disrupt temporally disciplined bodies. Attention to the different sensations of time encountered – fast, slow, and timeless – demonstrates how, in turn, those same feelings can generate strategies to counteract the temporal constraints imposed by the managerial and neoliberal university.
Cronenberg Pedagogy and Fleshy Possibilities for Educational Futures
Policy Futures in Education, Vol. 21, Issue 5. Special Issue: Educational Futures, Vol. 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103211052153 (2023; First published online October 23, 2021)
Instead of seeking the slick aesthetics of consumer-friendly creative stories, this paper ventures to the sublime of the incomprehensible and invites us to look into the abyss of education’s possibilities. Drawing inspiration from Jeff Vandermeer’s 2017 novel, Borne, and filmmaker David Cronenberg’s aesthetic, this paper aims to tell a story that unfetters easily compartmentalized notions of creativity in education. Borne tells the story of a young female scavenger who finds and proceeds to care for a sentient—and quite vocally curious—experimental biotech remain, while Cronenberg’s films famously bridge science fiction and body horror. Popular culture, in identifying this aesthetic, developed the slang term “to Cronenberg,” meaning to affectively highlight exaggerated mutations. To this end, this paper explores specific questions for educational futures: what does creativity mean for a Cronenberg pedagogy and how does the ethics of creativity inform future educational policy directions?
Emotional Fundamentalism and Education of the Body
Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 54, Issue 7. Special Issue: Empire and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1803838 (2022; First published online August 10, 2020)
This article examines the productive capacity of emotion through the concept of emotional fundamentalism. Emotional fundamentalism combines several key concepts—fundamentalism, affective labor, biopolitics, and capitalism’s contradictions—developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) to describe the intensified attention to the body in education. I investigate the implications of the increased organizational and corporate interest in emotion using an ongoing socio-emotional learning study and the introduction of artificial intelligence aggression detectors in schools. Doing so demonstrates the tendency of Empire to manage emotions in order to ensure viable production by educating the body as data and human capital. However, though Empire depends on emotions as a resource, these same emotions display a creative unruliness that exposes potential avenues to reproduce the common and enact multitude.
Slimer, Slime, and the Thingness of Pedagogy
Educational Perspectives, 51(1), 8–12. (2019)
Using Slimer from the 1984 film Ghostbusters as a metaphor, this paper considers the sensation and tangibility of pedagogy. For example, how does pedagogy feel? The intent is to explore the thingness of pedagogy through Slimer and what this thingness holds for thinking experimentally about pedagogy (Ellsworth 2005). The sensation of this slime-filled encounter presents an opportunity to interrogate assumptions made about things, subjectivity, pedagogy, and sensation in educational studies. Slimer illustrates a particular thingness in educational assumptions including “thing-power” to the affective sensations provoked with Slimer’s slime. Somatically engaging with the unbounded thing-power of slime, Slimer presents an affirmative pedagogy of thingness: a pedagogy that dismisses shallow limits defining appropriate production of knowledge and expectations of how to relate to objects, things, and, as in the case with Slimer, ghosts.
Pedagogical Possibilities of Becoming and the Transitional Space
Policy Futures in Education, 16(7), 893-905. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210317751265 (2018)
In this paper, I revisit a moment of self-provocation during preparation for a class. Reflecting and critically engaging with this memory presents a vignette to work through the possibilities of transitional space, the sensation of the becoming, learning self, and how the act of “catching myself” enables the reconsideration of engaging with pedagogy and assumptions made about education. Conceptualizing the learning self as becoming and in motion—rather than being, was, is, or to be—loosens the grasp of fixed educational assumptions that guide the discourse of education, in how it is conceived and acted out. This “loosening” has reverberations within the politics of how things are taught, considered, and learned, as it calls into question hierarchical valuations of what constitute “accepted” ways of knowing and being.
Book Chapters
Feeling pedagogy’s affective and material flashpoints in the science fiction animation “Zima Blue.”
In Bernadette M. Baker, Antti Saari, Liang Wang, & Hannah M. Tavares, (Eds.), Flashpoint Epistemology Volume I: Arts and Humanities-based Rethinkings of Interconnection, Technologies, and Education. Routledge. (2024)
Informed by Julietta Singh’s call for a dehumanist education to defy calcified colonial desires of human mastery and classification, this chapter takes a new materialist approach to excavate pedagogy’s flashpoints present in “Zima Blue,” an episode from the 2019 science fiction animated series, Love, Death & Robots. The episode follows Zima, a brilliant and cybernetically augmented artist whose work focuses on a specific shade of blue before the unveiling of their final masterpiece. The narrative ontologically unsettles human/nonhuman boundaries and demonstrates how this unsettling can disrupt subject-object distinctions taken for granted in contemporary educational habits despite the increasing entanglement of artificial intelligence and similar technologies. The chapter addresses three flashpoints: the material pull of the color blue, how Zima troubles the presumed educational subject, and the unruliness of pedagogical transformation. I suggest that paying attention to the affective and material dimensions of Zima’s blurred bodily distinctions between machine, artist, and artist-machine provokes the emergence of pedagogical flashpoints forefronting ethical and entangled ways of relating to others and things in the world.
Tension, Sensation, and Pedagogy: Depictions of Childhood’s Struggle in Saga and Paper Girls
In D. Kupferman & A. Gibbons (Eds.), Childhood, science fiction, and pedagogy: Children ex machina (2019)
Science fiction is untethered by assumptions of how people, things, and environments should act. The perceptions and portrayals of childhood in two science fiction comic series, Saga and Paper Girls, provide engagements with affective encounters. Attention to these encounters and the disruptive portrayals of childhood encourages the exploration of the pedagogic potential of sensation. Comics, as a genre, and childhood in each series inhabit ambiguity: comics blur the boundaries of popular culture objects and “properly” educative materials while the younger characters in Saga and Paper Girls are not quite adult or child, nor innocent or monster. An examination of Chapters 1 through 48 of Saga and Issues 1 through 18 of Paper Girls reveals approaches to engaging sensations of tension and discomfort. By using affect and new materialism as guiding frameworks for this examination of two comic series, it is possible to sift through the provocations of affect suggested by interaction with the material comic itself and the meanings this exploration holds for reconsidering educational habits.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES
New Materialism and Educational Innovation
In M. A. Peters & R. Heraud (Eds.), Encyclopedia of educational innovation. Singapore: Springer. (2020)
New materialism refers to an assemblage of theoretical and political perspectives that critique anthropocentric attitudes present in multiple fields of inquiry. New materialist perspectives in educational studies demonstrate innovation in two distinct ways. First, they provide conceptual approaches to address increasingly complex relationships encountered in the world. Second, they expand conventional, socially reproduced attitudes that consider innovation in educational studies – for example, technological advancements that use artificial intelligence in learning strategies – to be measurable and observable, with humans as the primary beneficiary. By presenting alternative frameworks to address pressing theoretical, philosophical, pedagogical, political, and ethical issues in education, new materialism demonstrates innovation’s possibility as dynamic, creative, experimental, and open-ended.
Sensation and Pedagogies in Teacher Education
In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of teacher education. Singapore: Springer. (2019)
This entry examines the contributions by two contemporary scholars, Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005, 2011) and Megan Watkins (2012), to provide an introduction to pedagogy and sensation in teacher education. Four sections organize the entry. First, a brief discussion of the philosophies about the body that undergird contemporary approaches to pedagogy and sensation elucidates the competing considerations of the body and thought. Second, sensation will be discussed, particularly how it is distinguished from sense, feeling, emotion, and experience. Demarcating the usages of sense, feeling, emotion, and experience is significant for work in this area for it clarifies the nuances of using sensation in conjunction with pedagogy. In addition, affect has resonance with the study of sensation in this perspective. Third, the impact these approaches have on reticulating pedagogy will be discussed. Finally, the meaning held by pedagogy and sensation for teacher education is deliberated with the assistance of pedagogy’s hinge, a concept developed by Ellsworth (2005).