Toward a Speculative Pedagogy

Abstract

In opening itself to the equivocal nature of materiality a speculative pedagogy might succeed in generating hopes for more liveable futures. The kinds of endeavours that times of uncertainty call for are by no means straightforward, calling, as I argue along with Elizabeth de Freitas (2020) writing in this volume, for a trickster modality and a bewildering pedagogy. The Anthropocene or Capitalocene are terms that capture the slippery nature of the crisis-riven present. Laden with ambiguity, contradiction and destruction, these descriptors also embody strange promises and afterlives. Beyond problematic present/futures produced by humans only for themselves lie intimate and uncanny sympoieses, world-buildings and meaning-makings with non-human others and more than human processes. In accounting for these as well as for the already entangled material conditions of our time, HE pedagogy needs to pay attention to the trickster-nature of cognition itself; a task to which the genre of science-fiction/speculative fabulation (SF) is primed.