Conference Agenda

Schooling is a profoundly ‘ritualized performance’ (e.g. McLaren, 1999). Not only is schooling itself a kind of rite de passage (Durkheim, 1915) with the purpose of preparing children for adult life – a school is also a place where everyday pedagogical life often depends on ritualized activities.

The notion of ritual has been of interest to philosophers of education already since the 1960’s (e.g. Bernstein et. al. 1966), but it has not been given much attention in recent years (Losito, W. F. 1996; Quantz, 1999). One reason for the neglect is political and historical suggesting that ritualistic practices connote to repetition, sameness and conformism, even to collective political manipulation and fascism (i.e. World War II, e.g. Adorno, 1997). Another reason is ethical and ideological, suggesting that rituals bear conservative connotations, referring either to habitual activities and routine (i.e. “empty ritual”), or to ancestry and tradition. In short, the pedagogical meaning of rituals has been of little interest to progressive theories of education due to its conservative connotations (Quantz et. al., 2011; Warnick, 2009) – a reluctance that seems to be rooted in its assumed inability to offer possibilities for change and transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore this ‘assumed inability’ and rethink the notion of ritual so that it holds possibilities for change. It is suggested that the notion of time is crucial in this regard and, hence, that a pedagogical rethinking of the notion of ritual also requires a rethinking of the notion of time. The question in focus is thus: what notion of time is needed for exploring the notion of ritual pedagogically, that is, beyond the divide between a progressive, future oriented idea of education rooted in a linear notion of time and a conservative, past-oriented idea of education rooted in a circular ditto?

To this end, the first part of the paper turns to Julia Kristeva’s (1995) critique of linear and circular time as well as to literary theorist Rita Felski’s (2015) focus on the experience of ‘doing time’ – two philosophers who both take the question of difference and different temporalities into account when rethinking the antithetical division between past and future, or, between preservation and transformation. The second part of the paper brings this discussion on time to bear on pedagogical practice, turning to scholars in philosophy of education who, inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, explore the school as the ‘time and space’ that a society inserts between the past and the future in the present (e.g. Masschelein & Simons, 2011, 2013; Todd, 2021, 2022; Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2019). By mobilizing particularly Felski’s notion of everyday time as a bodily experience beyond the circular – linear divide it is suggested, by way of conclusion, that a pedagogical understanding of rituals in schools can contribute both to rethinking education beyond the confines of modernity, and, in doing so, expand the repertoire within which teaching is understood as an affirmative gesture.

Glossed as “forced to do more with less”, postpandemic health care systems are calibrating mortality by articulating covid-19 imbued reductions in outpatient care as a form of learning: “this ‘natural experiment’ in reduced care may help health systems identify and address unnecessary care, and move towards greater sustainability.” Similarly, schooling systems are celebrating the increased safety measures imposed during the pandemic as a successful educational experiment in condensed curriculum, online delivery and socially sanitized classrooms. M. (name) will not return to his classroom even after the comprehensive lifting of measures as testing for complying with safety protocols is now recalibrated as testing for developmental fitness for learning. A new bill on special education cancels the right to school escort for students with disabilities, brings back mandatory testing for school entry, and sends students with disabilities back to separate-but-safe special education.

Saving lives from the pandemic put people under the rule of exception. For those, however, whose lives were already regulated through social hygiene, those contained in marginality, those “inhuman, and human-as-humus” (Haraway, 2015) surviving in “refuges”, the government tightening of social distancing was experience as a pastoral command for economizing contact but as criminalization of life. This paper explores how educational zones of slowness and morbidity --wherein marginality, stasis, and abjection are recomposted as zones of life-- reckoned with social distancing and shaming for not distancing effectively.

It draws from queer theorizations of temporality (Freeman, 2010; Love, 2009) and shame (Sedgwick 2003) and touches on stories of dissident intimacies during the pandemic to tease out the gentrification of queer theory and to relink the latter with a politics of sustainability: as a rewildening-and-queering of commoning. I suggest queering slowness and commoning in marginal educational zones through two supplementary moves: (a) reclaiming Aristotle’s “socializing of/in zoe” (κοινωνία ζωῆς; social communion) from reifying readings of zoe as biological life, and (b) making connections between queer theory and forms of dissident affective sociality not claimed as such in their living present. This asynchronous and perhaps also theoretically aberrant double touch--the touch on the pandemic as past and the touch of theory on narratives across genres-- follows what Carolyn Dinshaw (1999) calls a queer historical impulse: “an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.”

To be a proactive, efficient and productive student who is trained and able to act decidedly with skills and competences, seems to be the highest value and the gold standard of what higher education is aiming at. Thomas Huxley famous aphorism: “Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation" (Huxley & Huxley, 2011, p.51), leaves no room for any form of tarrying or hesitation. Quite the opposite, every form of inertia, hesitation, and slowing down is regarded as an impediment to progress and efficiency (Brunstad & Oliverio, 2019). The problem though might be, as Albert Einstein formulated it, that we can’t solve a problem with the ways of thinking that created it (Einstein, 1931). It starts to deem that our existing educational system, with its understanding of knowing and thinking, is a larger part of the contemporary global crisis we are facing, then a solution. We therefore need to reassess our educational system and its pedagogical, epistemological and ontological presuppositions.

Huxley’s aphorism might consequently be put to shame. A more passive and critical reflective mode of being, can be more valuable for the time ahead than first thought of. Not more of the same, but less. To slow down, to make a halt in order to revisit conventional practice and old thinking, can help students to better navigate and find new and more sustainable alternative sources of insight and wisdom. Tarrying or the art of hesitation can enable a form of attention or reflection that can unveil both the depth and the complexity of being (Brunstad & Oliverio, 2019) for the purpose of finding sager and better ways of doing.

This paper will scrutinize the value of a wise passivity that “enables things to come about less by what is done than by what is not done, that opens up possibilities where activity closes it down” (McGilchrist, 2012, p. 174, emphasis in original). A further elaboration upon this topic will take what John Keats calls ‘negative capability’ as its starting point. “Negative capability” characterizes a “man of achievement” who “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1970, p.43).

In a world marked by a high degree of uncertainty and doubts, Keats calls for an ability to tolerate ambiguity and complexity without filling the vacuum of uncertainty and not-knowing with “fact and reason”, and accordingly also renounce using old and well-known solutions. By refraining from knowing and doing, by not using one’s “positive capability”, an inner and outer space is left open and enables an active and attentive receptivity that can help students to find new and more relevant perspectives and possibilities. The art of hesitation developed in line with Keats “negative capability”, maintain an inner space needed for a hopeful and positive engagement with unknown and uncertain future (Bülow & Simpson, 2022, p.45).