David W Kupferman

This paper considers educational futures from the perspective of social justice. It takes as its framework futures studies, which looks at what is probable (what is likely to happen), what is possible (what could happen), and what is preferable (what we would like to see/make happen). It also makes the case for science fiction as a method of inquiry, arguing that science fiction is a useful method for determining what we think we might (or might not) want futures to look like, as well as where we think we are now. Science fiction, the paper argues, is as much about our anxieties about the present and where we might be headed as it is about any sort of futures we may ultimately arrive at. The paper draws from the works of well-known science fiction authors of color (WEB DuBois, Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin) as well as from lesser-known science fiction authors writing from American Indian, Latino/a/X, and LGBTQIA+com- munities. In so doing, the paper explores how science fiction has infiltrated the social imagination and how it leads to paths both dystopian (à la Elon Musk) and liberating (such as Afrofuturism). It concludes with examples of the probable, the possible, and the preferable in educational futures, drawing from contemporary science fiction stories centered on social justice.

This study takes a short trip into the near future to see what happens if Facebook bought the global education corporation Pearson. It takes a prefactual stance, meaning that it is responding to and extrapolating from an event that has not yet happened, but very probably could. The theoretical framework of this piece is futures studies, specifically educational futures, to take contemporary education policy issues and imagine what happens to them when they encounter our present-day anxieties of the future of society. Responding to the call for a creative turn in educational futures, the study uses a narrative approach to considerations of a probable future in which Mark Zuckerberg decides to stop donating hundreds of millions of dollars to various schooling projects and instead purchases Pearson's monopoly in the areas of teacher testing and licensing. In this way, Facebook exerts a level of control over teacher preparation that, while frightening, could very well come to pass. This piece also hopes to contribute to the development of educational dystopia as academic literature.

The year after the journal ACCESS originally launched, Octavia Butler (1983) published a short story titled "Speech Sounds" in the science fiction monthly Asimov's Science Fiction. The story takes place in the aftermath of a pandemic that seemingly has one of multiple effects: one either loses the ability to speak coherently, or one loses the ability to read and write (but not both). In this paper, I will discuss how this story has utility as an example of future studies. Futures studies is an attempt to game out multiple futures by using our present-day anxieties, institutions, and value systems to consider what is probable, what is possible, and what is preferable. Through future studies, I am looking for a new way for thinking about theory so that we can engage in imagining any number of educational futures, one that takes the scaffolding of futures studies and both looks to science fiction as its object of inquiry and reads educational research and policy as science fiction writing.

This chapter explores the contribution of science fiction to the study of education. It uses the perceived self-evident necessity of a new digital curriculum for Aotearoa New Zealand as the context for analysis, providing an argument for science fiction as a critical tool for questions concerning education. Philip K. Dick provides the provocation for this work through his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1993) in which a State addicted to big data cannot cope with the idea of an individual who does not appear on any database and thereby is not coded. In our adaptation of this work, we explore the implications of the rise of digital technologies in the national curriculum, wondering what Algorithmic Intelligence will think of the human teacher once it becomes self-aware, and what the teachers will think of being teachers in the digital, big data, society.

This paper considers the ways in which the words " school " and " education " are conflated in the social imaginary, and what the effects of this conflation in meaning and purpose are both theoretically and in practice. It is not difficult to see the ways in which these two terms are used almost synonymously, and uncritically. Yet " school " and " education " operate in a double-bind, as both are interchangeable in meaning while simultaneously opposed to each other: education is often defined as a traditional process, whereas school is a formal, updated structuring of that process. This paper looks first at the place of metaphor in terms of the construction of knowledge, and how that produces both a " proper " as well as a forgetting within and through discourses. Following Nietzsche's concept of metaphoricity, note is then taken of the distinctions between both the meaning and uses of metaphor and metonymy, in that the former creates conditions of applicability between concepts, while the latter allows one thing to stand in for another, effectively subsuming meaning altogether. These various notions are then applied to a trio of case studies, specifically from the region in Oceania commonly known as Micronesia, where interplay of metaphoricity and its effects on and in purportedly decolonizing contexts can be seen. Finally, a pair of schools in a Dr. Seuss tale are visited that provide a positive reticulation of spaces of education that is not beholden to the pernicious effects of metaphorical forgetting, substitution, and erasure, nor to a search for origins and latency.

This book invites readers to both reassess and reconceptualize definitions of childhood and pedagogy by imagining the possibilities - past, present, and future - provided by the aesthetic turn to science fiction. It explores constructions of children, childhood, and pedagogy through the multiple lenses of science fiction as a method of inquiry, and discusses what counts as science fiction and why science fiction counts.


The book examines the notion of relationships in a variety of genres and stories; probes affect in the convergence of childhood and science fiction; and focuses on questions of pedagogy and the ways that science fiction can reflect the status quo of schooling theory, practice, and policy as well as offer alternative educative possibilities. Additionally, the volume explores connections between children and childhood studies, pedagogy and posthumanism. The various contributors use science fiction as the frame of reference through which conceptual links between inquiry and narrative, grounded in theories of media studies, can be developed.

Neoliberal education reforms, most markedly No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, have codified such initiatives as privatization of public education, testing and accountability measures, and the transformation of teaching from a dynamic relationship of art to one of technical proficiency. Yet resistance to neoliberalism, and its education reforms in particular, have yielded no victories, despite the economic crises of the past decade; rather, neoliberal tenets seem more entrenched than ever. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternate response to neoliberalism, in the form of accelerationism, that does not rely on a return to a primitivist localism or direct action (such as that of the Occupy movement). Briefly stated, accelerationism does not try to reform neoliberal tendencies by going around them or from “within”; rather, it argues for accelerating those forces so that we can go through the free-market system, and thereby arrive at a post- capitalist future.

The theoretical framework employed in this paper is accelerationism. Originating from Marx’s (1993) analysis of labor power and surplus value in terms of technology and machinery, and developed further by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) in their call to turn away from a folk politics and move instead towards welcoming the means of capitalism (through its consequences of both deterritorialization and reterritorialization), accelerationism is a political argument that the effects of capitalism cannot be ameliorated or diminished, but rather that they should be increased and accelerated so that we can push through to a post-capitalist future. The term accelerationism was coined pejoratively in 2010 by Benjamin Noys, but was picked up by Williams and Srnicek (2013), who called for a repurposing and recovery of a democratic future. Capitalism, and specifically the neoliberal financialization of capital, which Williams and Srnicek trace back to the Thatcherite (and later Reagan) moment beginning in 1979 and which gained new importance after the economic crises of 2007-2008, paradoxically produces the very conditions of scarcity and precarity that its promises of surplus and infinite growth claim to resolve. Neoliberalism has no future; its only path is to a cataclysm of resources and ecology. Direct action does little to nothing in the face of market forces. The prescription, then, is to accelerate the processes of neoliberalism in order to reach possible, post- capitalist, futures.

While accelerationism as presented by Williams and Srnicek is not a perfect prescription, it is important to not dismiss the idea, as Noys (2014) does by tracing it back to Italian futurism/fascism and to the neo-reactionary and inherently pessimistic work of Land (2011). To be clear, accelerationism is not a matter of speed, wherein, like with Italian futurism, the point is to drive a car as fast as you can (with predictable results); rather, acceleration “is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013, para. 02.2). In this way accelerationism is a positive force, one that is a productive philosophical perspective that is most useful as an exercise in speculation. That is, what would accelerationist interventions today look like tomorrow? How can we appropriate the spoils of late capitalism in the form of (posthuman) technology in order to stake a claim to the future?

The mode of inquiry used here is what Shaviro (2015) refers to as an accelerationist aesthetics. Shaviro points out that accelerationism does not work as a practical political philosophy, since an acceleration of neoliberal market forces, in which there are already more losers than winners, would at worst no doubt exacerbate that fact on the backs of those least able to weather such an onslaught, and likely result in an antihumanism as advocated for by Land (2011). Conversely, accelerationism “offers us, at best, an exacerbated awareness of how we are trapped” (Shaviro, 2015, p. 34). Instead, Shaviro argues that accelerationism is best understood and utilized as an aesthetic philosophy, wherein “Speculative fiction can explore the abyss of accelerationist ambivalence, without prematurely pretending to resolve it” (p. 21).

To that end, the most effective aesthetic form that we currently have to begin to comprehend – and repurpose – the neoliberal nexus is that of science fiction. As Rucker (1983) explains, “The tools of fantasy and [science fiction] offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext” (n.p.). It is through the aesthetic of science fiction that I will consider the various accelerationist pedagogies already available to us, and what they tell us about speculative futures. In this way, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) description of capital as a “body without organs,” we can deploy a speculative science fiction discourse analysis as an avenue through which to play with accelerationism as an aesthetic philosophy, one that is “effectuated through fiction, a fiction that maps vectors of the future upon the present” (Reed, 2014, p. 529).

Since 2013, Comedy Central’s Drunk History has been teaching the American television audience about seminal events in the social imaginary from the perspective of the bottom of a glass. Each episode features Derek Waters, the show’s co-creator, having a conversation with a comedian explaining a major (and occasionally minor) moment in American history, all while getting progressively more drunk. The conceit of the show is that as the conversation unfolds, A-list celebrities are then shown in period costume acting out the event and lip-syncing the dialogue being provided by the inebriated narrators. The show could easily be dismissed as a novelty, except that it has potential to act as an important, and problematic, teaching tool: to wit, a student of mine in a social studies methods course once informed the class that she had just learned about Rosa Parks from the show.

The purpose of this paper is to consider Drunk History in two ways: first, to critically explore its value as a pedagogical medium; and second, to examine its role as a form of aesthetics and what its effects on the popular historical imaginary can tell us about the contemporary age. In the first instance, it is necessary to assess the ways in which an episode of Drunk History contributes to processes of learning and the production and exchange of knowledge in public discourse. Thus while each “lesson” featured in the show is refreshingly well-researched, its delivery relies on a combination of opera buffa and the grotesque (often the narrators vomit at some point), suggesting that this type of knowledge source does not try (or want) to be taken seriously.

What is missing from a critical standpoint is a way in which to theorize this sort of public pedagogy so that we can approach Drunk History from a position of new thinking about the productive value of popular culture. One way to begin this theorizing is by considering the show through the lens of aesthetics. According to Kant, aesthetic judgment is both indifferent (in that it has no bearing on my ability to live my life; I do not need to watch this show), and that it is non-cognitive (in that it is not dependent upon facts or information). It is here, where non-cognitive judgment encounters “history,” that we see a possible opening for theory. For while the dates and figures may be accurate in any given episode, the contexts in which we see the drama play out (complete with the lip-syncing of inane dialogue) are entirely farcical, suggesting not that this is a pedagogy of transgression but rather that it is an aesthetic pedagogy intent on reflecting the current age: that history is a tale best told drunk, and that in doing so we reveal in the historical imaginary an alternate way of thinking about how we can deploy popular culture as part of the processes of learning and knowing.

This paper considers the use of political cartoons as a pedagogical tool in the social studies classroom in such a way as to provide a counter-discourse to prevailing notions of learning about the “other,” employ and legitimate indigenous epistemologies, and challenge both normative values implicit in educational measurement as well as the benevolence of neo-liberal economic “development” in non-western societies. In order to do so, I “read” one-panel political cartoons as part of the curriculum in a social studies methods course. The use of these political cartoons provides social studies students and teachers a window into epistemologies and ways of constructing reality. In addition, this paper attempts to open up an alternative space in which these political cartoons can be read as heuristics of cultural critique and as a minor literature, by interweaving Lyotard’s ethical notion of just gaming, Bergson’s conception of the comic as productive, and the Pacific Islander custom of clowning, in which social norms and assumptions are actively inverted.

The theoretical framework of this paper employs the interlocution of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (1985) notion of ethical imagination and Henri Bergson’s (2005) analysis of humor and the comic as productive modes of being with the practice of clowning as social criticism among Pacific Islander communities. In this way, I am exploring the productive qualities of clowning as pedagogical discourse and counter- discourse, in the first instance so that we may trace the ways that Lyotard argues imagination “is not only an ability to judge; it is a power to invent criteria” (p. 17) – and by extension, criteria of legitimation and assessment; and in the second, to examine what Bergson means by a comic that “makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to be” (p. 9). For Lyotard, creativity is rooted in forms of knowing that are not ontological, and therefore prescriptive, but rather in justice, in what Nuyen (1998) names “imaginative knowledge.” It is through imagination, and importantly play, that spaces can be created in which alternative conceptions of ethics, justice, and ways of being upend what are otherwise normalized and non-contingent sets of “real” knowledge. This notion of ethical play and gaming, which is seemingly commented on by Bergson (albeit seventy years before Lyotard), suggests that the comic in a variety of contexts allows for the problematization of discourses in what are ostensibly socially acceptable, and therefore conservative, ways; yet it is this notion of comedy as a game that produces the possibility of inversion, not of critiques that are inherently conservative, but rather that are subversive, as it is this rewriting of the rules through the comic that presents the most formidable challenge to the social imaginary.

This paper “reads” the Coen Brothers’ cult class The Big Lebowski through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence and his call to ethical living. As a response to Newtonian, linear conceptions of time, eternal recurrence considers time as a circle, endlessly repeating, so that everything one does and each decision one makes will be done and made the same way for eternity. Herein lies Nietzsche’s ethical challenge, as one is required to meet every moment and decision as the best one can. It is with this framework in mind that I consider the Nietzschean themes evident in the film, about The Dude, aka Jeff Lebowski, a southern California stoner whose life seems to revolve around, and be defined by, bowling. In effect, bowling is eternal recurrence: it is not important whether one rolls strikes or gutters, but rather that the ball continues to return, only to be thrown down the lane once again. There is no redemption, according to Nietzsche, but there is reconciliation; in the film, The Dude reconciles the ethical requirement of eternal recurrence and amor fati, or one’s love of fate. In the end, The Dude serves as a workable stand-in for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as both figures come to be seen as life affirming and ethical beings.