“Engage! … and things will be fine.”
The language of engagement and engaged practices is gaining traction in times of intersecting crises. Arts and the humanities are interpellated as the last resort where other disciplines and approaches have failed. The call to art and the humanities goes hand in hand with the impetus to innovate, create, and deviate from the day-to-day conduct of politics and governance. The promise and hope conferred to engagement often obscures its actual terms and after-life. Engaging art and the humanities as remedy for social, environmental or political disarray in this way turns them into a quasi-magical weapon against inevitable demise.
This lecture series inquires the troubles of engagement in radical pedagogies inside and outside academia. It asks what it means to learn and unlearn habits of making and thinking in times of crises. Engagement is a janus-headed concept: on the one hand institutions promote it as a solution proposing “adapted” or “flexible” pedagogies, on the other hand it concerns forms of care, concern, and involvement that exceeds solutionism. Engagement, in this sense, is both a burden and a necessity—a site of experiment, relation, and practice.
The series convenes six conversational pairings of practitioners doing radical pedagogies inside and outside academic institutions. Together, these conversations aim to open up what can be done with the call for engagement: how to resist the solutionist framework of white governance, and how to build alliances between communities of practitioners of radical pedagogies in a minor key.
The lecture series are co-organised by Christoph Brunner and Claire Tio on behalf of ESPhil and RASL
14 nov 2025 | PARAPEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session, Erin Manning and Fumi Okiji inquire into the problem of higher education’s schemes of streamlined education and the calls for innovative and impact-driven research. It will engage with these perspectives through the intersection of neurodiversity and Black studies. They introduce the term ‘parapedagogies’ to problematize the divide between the classroom and its outside, asking how learning and unlearning require care for relationality and differentiation.
Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing. Okiji works across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her most recently published book is Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Erin Manning is professor of fine arts and philosophy at Concordia University. Recent books include The Being of Relation (Intellect), Unsettled (forthcoming, minor compositions), Out of the Clear (2022, minor compositions), and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). She works in the transversality of the three ecologies - the environmental, the conceptual and the social - with an emphasis on the aesthetico-political (3ecologies.org). Her artistic practices compose with movement, relation and emergent collectivity, always in conversation with neurodiversity - a recent exhibition is entitled 100 Acres (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 2024).
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12 dec 2025 | RHYTHMIC PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Josephine Zwaan and Vernon Chatlein draw on a history of pedagogical practices related to rhythm and music. As musicians, community organizers, scholars, and teachers, they explore rhythm as a pedagogical necessity. Problematizing linear forms of education, they seek out a polyphonic approach that challenges classic forms of attention and engagement. The session includes live musical elements.
6 Feb 2026 | SUSTAINABLE PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Sophie van Balen and Lisa Doeland reflect on sustainable pedagogy as ecological, sensorial and temporal practice: how to relate to the environment in a respectful and sensitive manner, but also how to sustain ‘engagement’ beyond the timeframe of a ‘project’ or ‘intervention’. This conversation explores the imperceptible yet life-sustaining role of air and waste as constant yet subtle forms of engaging and relating. The conversation addresses how to problematize non-engaged sciences in a major key, meaning dis-engaged reflection and practical inertness.
13 March 2026 | DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Flavia Meireles and Rosalba Icaza Garza open a conversation across Latin America and Europe on how to engage in practices of decolonization in education without losing the particularities of the territories where these practices take place. They address both the fatigue and the desire to disengage from the extractivist logic of the neoliberal university, and highlight possible modes of resistance and support.
24 April 2026 | MEDIATED PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Sofia Boschat-Thorez and Maxime Hackermann examine learning as a mediated practice shaped by techniques a technologies of communication, sensation, and collaboration. In this sense, media and technologies ask for an expanded scope of pedagogical practice that is always more-than-human. They propose a radical disengagement from the logics of platform capitalism and its educational tools, exposing the entrapments of contemporary institutions and imagining tactics of media-technological resistance.
15 May 2026 | COMMONING PEDAGOGIES
This is an in-person event, location to be announced.
In this final conversation of the lecture series, James Parnell and Lionel Deul delve into the joys and challenges of community-building and collective learning. This session problematizes notions of community as a homogeneous, harmonious entity that is given and ‘out there.’ As organisers and dancers within queer communities and the ballroom scene, James and Lionel bring their experience of creating spaces for every-body: spaces in which people come together not in spite of, but through their differences. Together, we will reflect on questions of ownership, power and conflict, and how the constant renegotiation of such questions dynamizes communities and our collective learning practices.