What We Read
Nomadic Theory – The portable Rosi Braidotti
By Rosi Braidotti
This book is essential reading for grasping a potent theoretical framework for why transgressive and transformative learning in needed in our world today. Rosi Braidotti gives us a deft history lesson about how our thinking as academics shapes the world that we are in and challenges to go beyond critique and deconstructive thinking towards a way a thinking that is generative, creative and affirmative in the face of the ‘injustice and vulgarity’ that we face in these times.
Recommended by Injairu Kulundu, Transgressive learning PhD scholar, co-learner and practitioner
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
By bell hooks
This book reads in many ways like the diary of a teacher who at every turn is challenged to think carefully about her praxis and how the very way that she engages with her students invites them to collectively traverse gender, racial and class boundaries. She demonstrates what an internal dialogue might look like for practitioners who want to create work that invites co- learners to be brave enough to move past the ossified trajectories of the status quo.
Recommended by Injairu Kulundu, Transgressive learning PhD scholar, co-learner and practitioner
Development Practitioners and Social Process: Artists of the Invisible
By Allan Kaplan
This book is a poetic rejoinder on how we can really slow down and zoom into the quiet art of social process. It offers us many reflective practices that can help us be more present as practitioners and co- learners as we trace our way forward. Kaplan gives us a wonderful resource that speaks to the heart of what it means to create a fertile centre for our work that can gently hold the questions we have about the present and most importantly to be patient enough to listen to what we feel called to create in the future.
Recommended by Injairu Kulundu, Transgressive learning PhD scholar, co-learner and practitioner
A Time For New Dreams
By Ben Okri
This book is a must have for anyone devoted to creating new trajectories in their work. Okri supports our endeavours by painting a visceral picture of a world that is worthy of our longing. In this book you can hear see these visions of the future booming through his potent words. He is bold enough to use a language that rouses us past the lethargy and lack of vision we currently see in the world. Most importantly he brings this book home by asking questions about what the role of the academy is in creating this future and what education should look like in the future. He gives us a horizon to steer towards as we gather our strengths and resources as practitioners in the present.
Recommended by Injairu Kulundu, Transgressive learning PhD scholar, co-learner and practitioner
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
By Miranda Fricker
In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. This book calls all educators and co-learners to give attention to the ethical dimensions of epistemic practices. To do this, she argues that the focus must shift to a greater consciousness of the negative space that is epistemic injustice, where reason and social power are entangled with other forms of social injustice. She calls us to listen in co-learning, and to engage in respectful silence in order to hear better each other’s epistemic experiences and contributions.
Recommended by Heila Lotz-Sisitka, co-learner and t-learning researcher and scholar
Studies in Expansive Learning: Learning what is not yet there
By Yrjö Engeström
This new book by Yrjö Engeström from the Centre of Research on Development, Activity and Learning at Helsinki University affirms the importance of giving attention to the processes of learning and how they emerge in multi-actor settings in the context of activity. He sees expansive learning as the central mechanism of transformation in societal practices, activity and institutions. The book provides a conceptual and practical toolkit for creating and analyzing expansive learning processes with the help of formative interventions in workplaces, schools and communities. It also considers some of the new challenges and possibilities for the learning sciences as people seek to learn to engage with complex and rapidly changing objects such as those dealt with in the sustainability sciences.
Recommended by Heila Lotz-Sisitka, co-learner and t-learning researcher and scholar
Pedagogy of process: Letters to Guinea Bissau
By Paulo Freire
This book documents Freire’s practice-based reflections on careful and cautionary sharing of ideas across continents. A rich introduction by Freire precedes the letters he wrote to Mario Cabral, the commissioner of education and culture in Guinea Bissau and his colleagues, between 1975 and 1976. By 1973, more than half of Guinea then constituted newly liberated zones, ruled by popular democratic structures. These letters present Freire’s liberatory praxis in support of the ongoing revolution in Guinea Bissau. The book’s introduction as well as his initial letters, foregrounds the importance of “authentic help”: experiences from other places can be shared and must be shared however they cannot be transplanted or imitated. The act of knowing involves the interrelated roles of “creator, recreator and reinventor” otherwise, it constitutes an ideology of domination. Thus, lessons learned in one context are relevant in another context to the degree that they are reinvented. Letter 7 includes detailed instructions for Freire’s process of dialogue. The letter walks the reader through the collection of generative themes to the representation of codes. Freire’s generative code is the object that ‘can be known’ or a discourse to be read, in dialogue with others. This constitutes collective process of learning to uncover deeper structural contradictions. The 60 page introduction including pictures, and the letters which follow constitute a rich account of Freire’s careful praxis as it crosses over the continents.
Recommended by Anna James, PhD student at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, RU
Staying with the trouble
By Donna Haraway
If there was ever a manifesto for transgressive learning in a hot and difficult time, Donna Haraway’s new book “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” would be it. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants, in troubling times. At the heart of this book is this concept of ‘staying with the trouble’: not shying away from the hot, sticky and oftentimes smelly messes surrounding climate change and the nexus issues intertwined within the ‘trouble’ of a warming planet; Haraway embraces this troubling space, and takes inspiration from the the “Cthonic” ones, the small creepy crawly critters “replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair” that turn the soil and oceans in into life-giving domains. They are the ultimate transgressive and transformative practitioners who, like alchemists, turn shit into gold. In so doing Haraway opens up our thinking to see troubling spaces, places and processes as rich learning and transforming opportunities, without romanticizing or simplifying the complexities of the trouble. She does this by theoretically and methodologically driving her thesis with the signifier “SF” which could stand for anything from Speculative Fabulation, Science Fiction, Science Fact, Speculative Feminism, Soin de Ficelle, So Far… and/or String Figures. SF becomes a transgressive instrument from which storytelling and fact telling become the primary means with which we can ‘stay with the trouble’, i.e. transgress and transform the dogmatic and often static narratives that are usually behind the trouble in the first place. The concepts, images, theories and instruments she employs are particularly useful for our work in “reframing narratives” in t-learning, as she opens up, dissolves, and transforms the ways in which we relate and create stories, and thus the real world cultural-ecological realities they conjure. Quoting ethnographer Marilyn Strathern: “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” Haraway takes this mantra further… “it matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories…” This is essentially the mantra of t-learning, where how these small ideas, images or narratives matter so deeply to how we learn, how we act and how we transform conditions that shape our lives and the lives of the more than human world. Haraway offers a myriad of examples of ‘reframing narratives” the most powerful is how she transforms the hyped up narrative surrounding the human induced epoch known as the Anthropocene (an entire epoch of apocalyptic devastation), she rather conceptualizes an epoch beyond this, one that doesn’t lead towards existential nihilism, but rather sees the Anthropocene, like KT Belt asteroid strike as a moment, not an entire geological period. Instead the Anthropocene (which she refers to call the Capitalocene- the epoch belt of capitalism) as one that thrusts us into the Chthulucene (pronounced “Thulu-cene”) an epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in “tentacular “practices (I will leave you curious to find our what tentacular practices are and why they are so important for t-learning). The Chthulucene, Haraway explains with wonderfully transgressed language, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. These terms, like the term “response-abilty” transform and transgress language and image making in an inspiring and revolutionary way that gifts us gateways and openings in how we might describe or shape our SF framing of t-learning, that is: Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying well together on a damaged earth.
Playing for change: Music festivals as community learning and development
By Micheal MacDonald
MacDonald’s proposal for A-CLD responds to a particular diagnosis of our times. He names this the Predatory Anthropocene, a hegemonic structure of semio-capitalism, enslaving our subjectivities (as articulated by Guattari and Deleuze) resulting in obscene situation where we engage in practices that put our planet and ourselves at extreme risk. Not to mention the unfathomable idea that 1% of the world controls most of its wealth.
Engaging aesthetic (complex) systems theory and critical pedagogy, he argues subjectivities are active and in process; they can be ‘enslaved’ in the predatory Anthropocene but also reclaimed through aesthetic resources. The festival and carnival machines in the context of music festivals are engaged to explain agentive creative processes for A-CLD.
This is the place of possibility from which MacDonald theorises A-CLD, animating a critical pedagogy of aesthetics, where artists (of all types) become educators and creators of a better world. Through engaging our aesthetic resources towards creativity and building community, we act in resistance to the predatory Anthropocene.
Reference: MacDonald, M. (2016) Playing for change: Music festivals as community learning and development. Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.
Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide
By Boaventura De Sousa Santos
Through a deep historical and philosophical treatise he gives us the tools to understand what knowledge production under scientific modernity has produced and how to think ourselves and the future out of its rational and linear cul- de- sac. He does so by engaging us with the politics of what is possible if we are able to collectively surface what is absent and pay attention to what is emerging. This he refers to as a ‘sociology of absences’ and a ‘sociology of emergences’. De Sousa Santos helps us to find ways to navigate our way out of the ‘learned ignorance’ that the academic project in collusion with scientific modernity has produced. He challenges us to be cognizant of the ‘orthopedic’, ‘lazy reason’ that has up until now failed in producing a dignified life for the earth that sustains us and all the living beings within it.
As part of moving beyond ‘learned ignorance’ Epistemologies of the South helps us acknowledge the way in which any knowledge is always partially blind. Each form of knowledge contributes something valuable but also possesses a blind spot somewhere- it always leaves some questions unanswered. He thus proposes that we need better ways of seeing, translating and working with different kinds of knowledge. He refers to these different forms of knowledge as ‘ecologies of knowledge’ that always relate to each another and the broader social context that they come from. In this way De Sousa Santos asks us to question and diversify the sources, agents and characteristics of the knowledge that we collaborate with.
This book offers us a perspective on how we can begin to restore the value of knowledge as emancipation. He boldly asserts that the primary purpose of knowledge should be to create greater solidarity and greater participation towards dignified future for the earth and all its inhabitants. It makes us ask important questions about what our work as intellectual- activists is producing and is ultimately an invitation to work in necessarily deconstructive and radically regenerative ways as we try and bear witness to the most important questions of our time.
Learning Activism: The intellectual life of contemporary social movements
By Aziz Choudry
It throws mainstream ideas of education, learning and knowledge production up in the air and reconsiders them in the concrete contexts of social movement activism: collective action concerned with exposing the forces behind the production and reproduction of inequality, injustice and environmental devastation. Working collectively to fight injustice depends critically on taking learning and knowledge seriously. This type of learning and knowledge requires a grounding in historical perspectives, concrete experience, self-reflexivity, spaces for critical dialogue and an attunement to what is emerging from contemporary struggles.
He writes from the perspective of someone who has spent many years in spaces of activism (self-determination and environmental justice struggles among others) and moved cautiously into academia resisting the tendencies of hierarchising knowledge and insisting upon continued engagement with social justice struggles in the community around his university. Much of his discussion draws on relates back to his own experience navigating the tension in activist and academic spaces, drawing critically on various thinkers before him.
After pointing out several important elements of ‘learning activism’ – such as experience, relations, praxis, history as a tool for social movements, popular education – he sketches out what the role of research in social movements should be. This chapter draws on the approaches and experiences of research approaches within social movements through incorporating the voices of social movement activists and how they engage research. As such it is a useful reference point for those who are attempting to merge research with concrete socio-ecological change on the ground. Some key points include: ‘peer review’ after the act of representation in dialogue with activists in praxis; dissemination in creative ways allowing the research to live on and evolve as the movement evolves; validity is found in its relevance to the movement.
This book provides a space in which to consider reflectively and creatively, one’s role in the ever choppy tides of research, education and possibilities for socio-ecological injustice.