In this article, I theorize school abolition as a shift needed to unsettle education within current times of ecological precarity. As a practice and horizon, abolition reorganizes schooling's ruling episteme by articulating humanity as a collective performance beyond the pedagogical paradigms of western man. Because racial capitalist schooling…

In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how education globally structures a particular cultural, historical, and onto-epistemic anti-Black/anti-Indigenous worldview. In Wynter's most neglected piece of…

In this essay, I analyse Egerton Ryerson's proposed curriculum for the first state-led mass public educational system in Ontario. Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools in Upper Canada during the wide-scale proliferation of state schooling across Turtle Island, produced proposals for "universal" common schools, as well as…

The future viability of the humanities in higher education has been broadly debated. Yet, most of these debates are missing an important consideration. The humanities' object of study is the human, an object that some would argue has been replaced in our onto-epistemological systems by the posthuman. In her 2013 book, "The Posthuman,"…

In this afterword we bring insights from the special issue into conversation with the ongoing educational challenges of imagining the world differently. To do so, we consider how global mobilities are conceptualized and materialized within three "pillars" of the architecture of modern existence: the nation-state, global capital, and…

Humanism and the concept of the human that informs pedagogical discourse have been increasingly questioned by what has been called "post-human times." In this paper, we situate Paulo Freire's (1970) "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," and Nathan Snaza and John Weaver's (2014) "Posthumanism and Educational Research" within…

This paper considers how literacy and education more broadly reflect and reproduce world views and communicative practices rooted in the western epistemological conceptualization of what Sylvia Wynter calls "Man". I frictionally think-with Wynter's hybridity of bios and logos (mythoi), and more-than-human theories in relation to an…

At stake in contemporary US racial tensions is a struggle over the meaning of being "human." By drawing on black feminist theories of being human as verb, and minority discourse critiques of humanism, the paper links "racialization" to apparatuses of humanization that emerge in early modernity including slavery, colonization,…

Sylvia Wynter's wide-ranging intellectual contributions contain a poetics of being and becoming human that serve to counter the hegemony of developmental psychology and its articulation of the child in teacher education. In this article, I use Wynter's insights to unsettle the universality of this child figure to reveal the child of Man, a…

In a 2009 American Educational Research Association session on the topic of public pedagogy, Bill Ayers, serving as the session's discussant, posed the problem of public pedagogy being so broadly conceptualized in the literature base that it might actually become meaningless. Ayers's concern centered on the slippery, ever-proliferating meanings of…

Hannah Arendt articulates natality as the very "essence of education." Natality expresses the unique capacity of each person to bring about something new in relation to an inherited world. Education's difficult work, in Arendt's view, is not only to introduce students to the truths of the world as it is, but also to nurture the capacity to make…