Conference Agenda

Davina Cooper (2013, p. 3) describes an everyday utopia as a ‘form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, and practices that is oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibility of other, better worlds’. Departing from the conventional understandings of utopia as an abstract ideal yet to be attained, or a compensatory fantasy that makes the unideal present ‘liveable’, an everyday utopia can be understood as an orientation or a method (e.g. Bennett, 2001; Bloch, 200), enacted through experiments with new ways of living together that ‘stay with the trouble’ (e.g. Haraway, 2016).

In this sense, everyday utopias must be thought of in terms of the concrete, embedded possibilities that reach towards an emergent future, as that which sits within a particular tension of latency and tendency, the imagined and the actualised. Crucially, everyday utopias are practical. They do not serve to deny or escape from the present but put into practice a set of values underpinned by commitments to organising – and routinising – new ways of living.

Everyday utopias can be axiomatic in nature, insofar as these commitments may be regarded as fictional, nonexistent or impossible, but that nevertheless lend themselves to new imaginaries for living. Take the work of Jacques Rancière (1991) as an example, particularly his idea of acting on an axiom of equality. Rancière advises us to act as if people were equal in order to let what seems impossible appear in the here and now. Although the axiom itself is “theoretical” (in the conventional sense), it is also “practical”, insofar as it requires practical decisions and arrangements that confirm it, instead of some lofty, purely future-oriented declarations.

Affirmation of a so-called “fictional” axiom involves more than simply a critical awareness of the impossible. Although critique is implicit in everyday utopias (e.g. they can reveal/contest prevailing social norms, unsettling commonsense appropriation of concepts), they also move us beyond any vague assurances of ‘future emancipation’. Rather, “everyday utopias might contribute to a transformative politics by sustaining what is’ (Cooper, 2013, p. 15). Naturally, this would not mean simply conserving the status quo, but might instead refer to (im)possible trajectories of the present invented and explored in the practices of speculative fiction (e.g. Stengers, 2015). Or it might involve sustaining what is, an affirmation of which requires an attitude of care and responsibility for our world, for protecting what is still worthwhile within it. In the case of education, everyday utopias therefore point towards a post-critical rather than critical orientations – a way to discern and preserve particular practices and to explore their future (im)possibilities, rather than an approach that exhausts itself in the debunking critique of the present.

In this symposium, three papers converge to explore the existence and/or the possibility of everyday utopias in education. The first paper serves as an introduction to utopianism in educational theory and turns to the concept of performative utopias as connected to utopias in the everyday sense. The second paper asks what a renewed attunement to the present might mean for education, connecting this to Heidegger’s notion of “poetic dwelling” and the possibility of transformative politics in “making oddkin” on a damaged earth (Haraway, 2016). The third paper turns to the concept of “slow spaces” as an example of an everyday utopia that is possible (and yet threatened) in the modern university.

In this contribution, I examine the various ways that utopian thinking can reinvigorate educational practices following their radical critique. Departing from the meaning that debunking has for our ability to imagine and theorise possible forms of the social world other than the status quo, I contend that the more critique reveals fundamental structures of oppression, the more difficult it seems to oppose them, i.e. the more unimaginable resistance becomes. In other words, radical critique leads to the 'secondary naturalisation of the world' (Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2020) which eventually results in cynicism (Sloterdijk, 1987). For that reason, radical critique is usually paired with utopia – especially in educational theory – as the hope-giving instance. I will refer to the work of Henry A. Giroux (1983; 2011) to make this case. Subsequently, from within this example, I will argue that working in the conditions “after critique” always relate to at least four ways of forming utopias (i.e. of forming our hope). Two of them ('totalitarian' and 'escapist' utopias) represent the reasons utopian thinking was itself an object of critique in the 20th Century. In order to reconstruct these, I refer to the arguments Hans Jonas (1984) laid out against Ernst Bloch (1995). What Giroux proposes is a different kind of utopian thinking, however, which I refer to as 'debunked' utopia. Debunked critique pertains to utopias as regulative ideas for political struggle, insofar as they are aware of the injustices, inequalities, and oppression, and therefore function as an ontological expression of a gut-scream for justice, equality, and freedom. Given that these are so attached to the critique of the existing status quo, I argue that they are “utopias of the possible”, representing desires of the negative (desires for what’s not) rather than an alternative one would be able to affirm. With Jacques Ranciere (1991), I reconstruct a fourth option of utopias that can be practised – namely, 'performative' utopias - where actors make what seems impossible (from the point of view of our critical knowledge about the world) happen here and now. In such cases, they act not against the existing status quo, but in spite of its existence, forming, in such a way, a particular breach in the existing order of things, a sphere of exception. I argue this understanding of utopia is crucial for theorising education today, examples of which can be found in “everyday utopias” explored in the subsequent papers.

Bloch, E. (1995) The Principle of Hope. N. Plaice, St. Plaice, P. Knight transl. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press Giroux, H.A. (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education. A Pedagogy for the Opposition. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H.A. (2011). On Critical Pedagogy. New York – London: Continuum. Jonas, H. (1984). The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Transl. H. Jonas, D. Herr, Chicago – London: The University of Chicago Press. Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Kristin Ross, Trans.). Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (1987), Critique of Cynical Reason, transl. M. Eldred, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Vlieghe, J., Zamojski, P. (2020) Towards an immanent ontology of teaching. Leonard Bernstein as a case-study, “Ethics and Education” vol. 15 no. 1, s. 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2019.1700444

Cooper’s (2013) everyday utopias can be taken as a call to reorient educational theory and practice towards a renewed engagement with the present. But how can attunement to the present be cultivated in and through education? How can the required openness to the unforeseen be conceptualised given the nature of education as a perpetual departure from ‘what is’ that requires normative direction? To reflect on these questions, drawing mainly from Heidegger and Haraway, I connect Cooper’s idea of everyday utopia with the concept of ‘dwelling’. ‘Dwelling’ resonates with everyday utopias as practical attempts to not only think differently but to be in the world differently. For Heidegger, dwelling is attained through building for dwelling’s sake, which includes both cultivating (tending to and preserving our surroundings) and constructing (“raising up edifices” (Heidegger 1971, 145)). An education oriented towards ‘dwelling’ is not about creating a particular future, but about truly inhabiting the present moment with care, openness, responsiveness and responsibility; an engagement with the world that is educationally meaningful. Keeping with the spirit of Cooper’s everyday utopias, ‘dwelling’ is not about the idea of ‘future emancipation’, but about authentic being and participation as means for present emancipation. Primordially connected to being, building that contributes to dwelling “corresponds to the character” (Heidegger 1971, 156) of things, responding to the inherent potentiality of Dasein. Heidegger uses the term ‘poetic’ to further elucidate the nature of ‘dwelling’ as authentic ‘presencing’ – both of the self and others. The poetic, following Heidegger, is about “the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (71). As such, ‘dwelling’ is inherently utopian: it opens present avenues for transformation “by sustaining what is.” (Cooper 2013, 15) Heidegger’s notion of ‘poetic dwelling’ resonates with Haraway’s call in 'Staying With The Trouble' (2016) for the need to be present in, with and “on a damaged earth” (2016, 2). This “requires learning to be truly present […] as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1); it “requires making oddkin [through] unexpected collaborations and combinations” (5). Haraway allows us to conceptualise co-construction outside an anthropocentric idea of continuous progress through rational discourse. The commitment to ‘staying with the trouble’ is itself utopian (114). Haraway draws an arc between the educational (practical and theoretical), ethical and political aspects of dwelling (Stengel 2019), and connects to Cooper’s vision of everyday utopia as a form of transformative politics.

Cooper, D. (2013). Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Stengel, B. S. (2019). Com-Posting Experimental futures: Pragmatists Making (Odd)Kin with New Materialists. Studies in Philosophy and Education 38(7), 7-29.

Attenuating the modern logic of efficiency, several international “slow movements” have spawned. The most famous is perhaps the “slow food movement” (Petrini, 2005), but they also appear in tourism, art and cinema, urban design – and, indeed, in education (Berg and Seeber, 2016). For those advocating slowness, the growth of the so-called “edgeless city” is intimately connected to the thoughtlessness that characterises modern forms of consumption, where our capacity to dwell in such spaces is limited, and where we are left with a sense of dislocatedness and disenchantment. Slow movements are examples of what Cooper (2013) calls ‘everyday utopias’: they seek not merely to critique, but to put into practice a set of concrete actions underpinned by commitments that make possible alternative forms of living, alternative ways of engaging with worthwhile activities. Lamenting the so-called “reading crisis” in modern society, Waters (2007) argues this relates not only to our failures to address structural inequalities but also the sense in which we no longer find time to engage in contemplative – or slow - forms of reading. Where reading is taught, it is in the form of “speed reading”, resulting in the reduction of literature to "graphs and charts". Waters asks: what happens if we go inside a book - becoming still, slow? These time-consuming practices produce a "deeply profound quiet that can overwhelm your soul, [in which] you can lose yourself for an immeasurable moment of time". To read literature is, indeed, "…to mess with time, to establish… its own rhythm.” Waters’ (2007) argument might easily slip into a neo-Luddite critique of modern technology, particularly considering recent concerns around students’ use of AI tools/speed-reading apps. Although originally a critique of the accelerating forces of modernisation, the value of slowness in this paper points to existing contemplative practices in the university that enable heightened aesthetic or sensory experiences through which the possibility of fully immersing ourselves is allowed. It calls for the protection of these spaces - both physical study spaces threatened by the logic of efficiency with increased student numbers, the growth of digital resources etc. (e.g. Carnell, 2017; Mathews and Walton, 2014), as well as conceptual spaces that include ‘slow ways of thinking’. Slowness is also made possible through what Sedgwick (2002) calls reparative reading – an orientation that seeks to preserve rather than deconstruct the text, that instead requires radical receptivity, and that represents an example of a particular "utopia-in-practice”.

Berg, M. and Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: challenging the culture of speed in the academy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Carnell, B. (2017). Connecting university spaces with research-based education, Journal of Learning Spaces, 6 (2). Cooper, D. (2013). Everyday utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces, USA: Duke University Press. Matthews, G. and Walton, G. (2014). Strategic development of university library space: widening the influence, New Library World, 115 (6/7), pp. 237-249). Petrini, C. (2004). Slow food: the case for taste, USA: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2002), Touching Feeling, Durham, USAL Duke University Press, Durham. Waters, L. (2007). Time for reading, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (23).