Emancipation,equality and education: Rancière's critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity

Jacques Rancière's work has had significant impact in philosophy and literary theory, but remains largely undiscussed in the field of education. This article is a review of the relevance of Rancière's work to education research. Rancière's argument about education emerges from his critique of Bourdieu, which states that Bourdieu reinforces inequality by presuming it as the starting point of his analysis. What is at stake is the question of performativity, and the means by which discourse has effects. This debate has implications for considering the basis of claims to truth in literary and social science discourse. Parallels are drawn between Judith Butler's and Rancière's portrayal of the relationship between discourse and subjection, as well as their attention to discursive ‘imitation’ in making inequality representable. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematic which Rancière's work suggests for education research.     

Acknowledging Ambivalence in Teaching about Art and Aesthetics

In this article Daniel Brodén explores the ambivalence in teaching about art and aesthetics in the humanities. By comparing and contrasting Gert J. J. Biesta's educational theory and Jacques Rancière's writing on aesthetics, he hopes to bring some of the particularities of aesthetic experiences into focus and to discuss a tension in educational situations that concern students' interpretation of aesthetic texts: how the teacher, on the one hand, will serve as a representative for a formal system of education — or what Rancière calls a system of inequality — and, on the other hand, should respect the autonomy of the aesthetic experience. Brodén argues, however, that more interesting than the ambivalence itself is the question of how we can acknowledge this tension in productive ways. Thus, his aim here is to show how the teacher can contribute to the verification of an interpretive approach to art, with Rancière's axiom of equality in mind. Drawing on Biesta's writings, Brodén also highlights how the teacher can provide students with possibilities to pursue a subject-ness and how the risks involved call for a deconstructive approach to the enactment of teacher power. The article concludes by suggesting that we would do better not to view the ambivalence in focus as a problem, but instead to see it as something that calls for continuous engagement and critical reflection.     

Aesthetics,Affect, and Educational Politics

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics.     

“Listen Then,or, Rather,Answer”: Contemporary Challenges to Socratic Education

The popularity of Jacques Rancière in recent work in educational philosophy has rejuvenated discussion of the merits and weaknesses of Socratic education, both in Plato's dialogues and in invocations of Socrates in contemporary educational practice. In this essay Jordan Fullam explores the implications of this trend through comparing Rancière's educational thought to an analysis of the relationship between dialectic and stultification in Plato's Republic. This task clarifies what is useful in the recent wave of scholarship that brings Rancière's work to bear upon Socratic education, and what we might redeem in the practice of teaching that Plato assigns to the character of Socrates in the Republic. Fullam also draws on the educational literature on Socratic education to provide further context to explore the usefulness of both Rancière and Socrates for contemporary teaching.     

Education in the Realm of the Senses: Understanding Paulo Freire's Aesthetic Unconscious through Jacques Rancière

In this article I re‐examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts‐based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem‐posing classroom is an accompanying shift in the very aesthetics of recognition. In order to demonstrate the always already aesthetic nature of all education, I will turn to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Through Rancière we can begin to understand how the pedagogy of the oppressed is predicated on an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, of what can be seen and what can be heard. As Rancière will confirm, if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy.     

Troubling notions of risk: dissensus,dissonance, and making sense of students and learning

This article troubles constructions of ‘at-risk students.’ Utilizing Rancière's discussion of dissensus, the author first argues that what is at risk are not students but contemporary common sense notions of schooling. From this perspective, students' labeled as ‘at risk’ ways of knowing and being that interrupt ideas and ideals about the purpose and function of schooling. In order to make this argument, the author links Rancière and others' discussions of the importance of dissensus to questions of sense-making, the dangers of resonance in consensus, and the possibilities in the dissonance of dissensus. These assertions are then further complicated by the assertion that education is a necessarily risky endeavor and that all students should be placed at risk of learning. Understanding all students as at risk is significant as it simultaneously provides a space for students' complex constellations of identity to be treated with dignity in learning experiences and creates a less punitive context in which differences are less likely to be conceptualized as deficits.     

Book reviews

Jacques Rancière remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Rancière argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a point of departure for social and pedagogic encounters. He also emphasises the importance of aesthetics and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a mechanism for understanding who is un/able to be seen, speak and produce knowledge. These arguments are examined through an analysis of two research-based art installations: Sociologists Talking (2008, 2009) and The Idea of a University (2010). I consider the potential for ‘alternative’ forms of knowledge production and communication to enact different pedagogic methods and re/distribute the sensory spaces in which research and teaching take place.     

Jacques Rancière’s Lesson on the Lesson

Abstract

This article examines the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work on pedagogy, and argues that to make sense of Rancière’s ‘lesson on the lesson’ one must do more but also less than merely explicate Rancière’s texts. It steadfastly refuses to draw out the lessons of Rancière’s writings in the manner of a series of morals, precepts or rules. Rather, it is committed to thinking through the ‘lessons’ of Rancière in another sense. Above all, Rancière wants to ‘teach’ his readers something absolutely crucial about teaching. In making this claim the article emphasizes the extent to which Rancière advocates an utterly radical pedagogy, one that completely reconceives all the central elements of ‘schooling’, including teacher, student, intelligence and knowledge. Rancière thinks it possible to teach without knowing; he believes that the best schoolmasters can operate not on the assumption of their expertise, but on the equality of intelligence; and this means ultimately that Rancière contends that we can ‘teach what we do not know’. The best schoolmasters are ignorant schoolmasters. Rancière’s radical pedagogy depends upon, just as it consistently advances, a thoroughgoing resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery. The rejection of mastery—of schoolmasters who would know it all, and convey this knowing to their students—forms the very backbone of all of Rancière’s writings and critical investigations. This is the chief reason why Rancière is, in a way, always talking about pedagogy, even when his subject matter appears to be something else entirely.     

Re‐envisioning Human Rights in the Light of Arendt and Rancière: Towards an Agonistic Account of Human Rights Education

This article takes up Arendt's ‘aporetic’ framing of human rights as well as Rancière's critique and suggests that reading them together may offer a way to re‐envision human rights and human rights education (HRE)—not only because they make visible the perplexities of human rights, but also in that they call for an agonistic understanding of rights; namely, the possibility to make new and plural political and ethical claims about human rights as practices that can be evaluated critically rather than taken on faith. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the need for a renewal of HRE by suggesting that the paradoxes of human rights—such as the disparity between the reality of the human condition and the abstract ideal of human rights—can be politically and pedagogically invigorating by rethinking human rights in agonistic terms and formulating more robust practices of HRE.     

NGO Art Education

How is art education being put to use today? To explore this provocation, I read between the lines of teaching for civic literacy through visual arts education in the United States as mandated by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. I consider an art education of social practice's utility within this mandate. In order to accomplish this, I describe artist Rick Lowe's Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow social sculpture project and then analyse this through a service aesthetics’ lens and neoliberal motives. In the process of overlaying social practice within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a model for visual arts and citizenship education toward globally competent graduates, I articulate the possible limitations of such micro‐utopian ventures for art education that amount to NGO‐esque art, making the case that these efforts, while facilitating a feeling of civic engagement, only further intensify the depoliticisation of art education acting as a form of Rancière's better police in reasserting the neoliberal status quo. I sound a cautionary note about such a pragmatic turn risking the exacerbation of our collective interpassivity through aligning art education too closely to our apparent use value for late capitalism.     

‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.     

Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation.     

RECONSIDERING EMANCIPATORY EDUCATION: STAGING A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PAULO FREIRE AND JACQUES RANCIÈRE

In this essay Sarah Galloway considers emancipation as a purpose for education through examining the theories of Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière. Both theorists are concerned with the prospect of distinguishing between education that might socialize people into what is taken to be an inherently oppressive society and education with emancipation as its purpose. Galloway reconstructs the theories in parallel, examining the assumptions made, the processes of oppression described, and the movements to emancipation depicted. In so doing, she argues that that the two theorists hold a common model for theorizing oppression and emancipation as educational processes, distinguished by the differing assumptions they each make about humanity, but that their theories ultimately have opposing implications for educational practices. Galloway further maintains that Freire and Rancière raise similar educational problems and concerns, both theorizing that the character of the relations among teachers, students, and educational materials is crucial to an emancipatory education. Galloway's approach allows discussion of some of the criticisms that have been raised historically about Freire's theory and how these might be addressed to some degree by Rancière's work. Taking the two theories together, she argues that the possibility for an emancipatory education cannot be ignored if education is to be considered as more than merely a process of passing down the skills and knowledge necessary in order to socialize people into current society.     

Subjectivity and the Arts: how could be Hepburn an objectivist

Hepburn argues that all education, and so Arts Education, educates a person's subjectivity, his or her Lebenswelt; though the sciences take the ‘objectifying way’ they too educate our subjectivity. I show why there can be no decision procedures, involving the use of logical operators for interpreting a work of art, but argue that Hepburn's view that music etc. can furnish ‘authoritative imaginative realisations’, nevertheless presupposes a ‘soft’ objectivist position. Whilst Hepburn is right in thinking that the subjective provides the context for objectifying procedures in education (and more generally), it cannot be the case, as he implies, that aesthetic criteria could have a role in the selection of preferred scientific explanations and theories. It is, however, argued that the aesthetic can be generative of objectifying ways, or theoryenabling.     

The People Against Corporate Personhood: Doxa and Dissensual Democracy

This essay theorizes dissensual democracy as an event that requires both demonstration and critique of doxai. Jacques Rancière joins many theorists in rhetorical studies by arguing that democratic doxa is necessary for transformative collective politics. But Rancière famously dismisses the possibility that post-ideological approaches such as “critical rhetoric“ might contribute to democracy. Critique, however, has an important role to play in dissensual democracy. The political rhetoric of the anti-corporate Move to Amend shows how both demonstrations and critiques of doxai are required to produce the appearance of a democratic subject of enunciation, which, I argue, is a type of Deleuzean sense-event.     

Reflections on the emancipatory potential of vocational education and training practices: Freire and Rancière in dialogue

This paper focuses on the issue of emancipation in education practices in general and in vocational education and training (VET) in particular. The principal aim is to contribute to the discussion of particular traditions of emancipation in education in connection with VET practices. The exploration of ongoing educational debates on VET policy-making and the issue of emancipation in VET reveals that, ultimately, emancipation in VET is understood as a specific function for socio-economic integration. The paper discusses this functionalist orientation and contrasts it with a vision on emancipation as a feature of an educational process rather than an educational outcome. Freire's and Rancière's core concepts of emancipation guide the discussion regarding the latter interpretation of emancipation in VET practices.     

A tentative return to experience in researching learning at work

This paper explores possibilities for more democratic approaches to researching learning in and through everyday workplace practices. This links with a concern with who is able to speak in representations of learning at work, what is able to be spoken about and how knowing, learning and experience are inscribed in theories of workplace learning. I propose that Rancière’s notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, which draws attention to an aesthetic dimension of experience, knowledge and politics, provides a useful way of exploring learning in and through everyday workplace practices. The approach points to the possibility of knowledge without hierarchies and a shift from a knowledge – ignorance binary. An understanding of experience as aesthetic enables accounts of learning which counter the story of destiny in literature on learning in and through everyday practice. It also points to a very different way of doing academic research. The presupposition of equality is the point of departure in this approach and the purpose of research is the verification of equality (rather than the verification of oppression). The paper makes a significant contribution to literature on learning in and through everyday workplace practices by disrupting a prevailing view that knowledge is necessarily tied to identity.     

Against the Grain: An intervention of mastery learning and intellectual emancipation in art education

In a case study of an undergraduate course in art education, modes of mastery learning and propositions of intellectual emancipation were explored as interventions in curriculum design. By adopting Rancière’s framework of a ‘will to will’ relationship between instructor and students, the core assignment—a visual journal—became a site of student positionality through mastery methods, rather than information gathering. The visual journal provided a record of the event of knowledge and served as a forum to verify that acts of student thinking were done with attention, congruent with Rancière’s perspective that learning generates greater consciousness, feeling and action. Requiring both qualitative and quantitative criteria within the parameters of the visual journal functioned as a means to experiment with the potential convergences of mastery and emancipatory approaches. The visual journal then operated as a third space where ongoing, consistent engagement demonstrated the capacity of students to encounter more equitable relations with the instructor and with the content in ways that have implications for knowledge creation in teaching and learning.     

Moral Education and Literature: On Cora Diamond and Eimear McBride

I argue in this paper for the rich and subtle connections between moral philosophy and literature as they are articulated and explored in the work of the contemporary American philosopher, Cora Diamond. In its significance for broader educational debates—specifically, debates regarding the value of the arts and humanities in a context of global economic collapse—Diamond's work is strikingly original. I argue that it offers much more to educators than the related work of her Anglo‐American contemporaries, among them Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. In development of my position, I read Diamond's 2008 essay, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, withA Girl is a Half‐formed Thing, the debut novel of Irish writer Eimear McBride.     

From Meritocracy to Aristocracy: Towards a Just Society for the ‘Great Man’

In the practice of education and educational reforms today ‘meritocracy’ is a prevalent mode of thinking and discourse. Behind political and economic debates over the just distribution of education benefits, other kinds of philosophical issues, concerning the question of democracy, await to be addressed. As a means of evoking a language more subtle than what is offered by political and economic solutions, I shall discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of perfectionism, particularly his ideas of the ‘gleam of light’ and ‘genius’, as an alternative mode of thinking of human power. Through this Emersonian lens, a provocative shift will be made from meritocracy and ‘mediocracy’ to aristocracy. Emersonian aristocracy destabilizes balanced measures and prevailing discourse about fairness and justice, and makes us reconsider how to achieve a just society in democracy. As an educational implication, I shall propose the idea of citizenship without inclusion—a vision of education for a democratic society in which we learn to live as and with the Great Man.