Unschooled Futures

This volume stages a series of radical provocations that seek to reorient the very conditions under which learning becomes thinkable. Refusing the redemptive pull of schooling as a salvageable public good, the collection foregrounds the necessity of undisciplining education, dislodging it from its colonial grammars, disciplinary enclosures, and anthropocentric imaginaries.

Schools, far from neutral spaces of knowledge transmission, are infrastructural technologies of late capitalist governance: disciplining bodies, managing time, and sustaining the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands under the guise of progress and order. Drawing from grotesque materialisms, Indigenous epistemologies, and speculative philosophies, the volume positions pluriversal indeterminacy as a generative ontological condition, contesting the closure-driven logics of Western educational taxonomy. If schools operate as entropy-displacement machines, maintaining systemic stability through the externalization of collapse, then what is required is not critique alone, but a methodological insurgency capable of abolishing education’s epistemic foundations. To this end, contributors—traversing anthropology, architecture, mathematics, biology, Indigenous studies, art, philosophy, and literature—articulate a constellation of non-disciplined pedagogical experiments that emerge from the current unraveling of education itself. Through deliberate acts of epistemic undoing, authors inhabit a space where fixed categories, such as human/nonhuman, past/future, knowledge/ignorance are rendered inoperative, making room for learning that reconfigures the possible.

Author Biography

Petra Mikulan teaches in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she completed SSHRC and Killam funded postdoctoral fellowship.

Nathalie Sinclair is Distinguished University Professor at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is co-author of Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom (2014).