The focus of this special issue is the meaning and persistence of teaching in a time of dread. David Theo Goldberg suggests that dread is the underlying mood, vibration, and tone of our time. Dread organizes and haunts subjectivity and collective experience. Unlike grief, which is a nameable feeling of loss stemming from a discernible cause, dread is more akin to melancholy, an affective state of being that saturates, afflicts, and floats without name. Dread is embodied and anticipatory. It is the felt destabilization of world, space, and time within late capitalism. This special issue seeks philosophical, theoretical, and personal essays and commentaries that reflect on what it means to teach, and the persistence of teaching, amid an ambient culture of dread.
Widespread speculation of civil war today obscures an ongoing and deeper war against civil society, against history, against memory, against difference, against compassion, and against solidarity. Dreadful symptoms are manifold and include intensified attacks on educators, schools, and universities by finance capital, dark money networks, white nationalists, and neo-fascists. This reflects a war against the very idea of teaching as a pursuit of ideas, care, joy, truth, and justice. What does it mean to teach in a climate of racist dread and homophobic paranoia? What does it mean to teach when educators are perceived as a potential enemy? What does it mean to teach when suicide rates among youth, who are always more attuned to the present, have tripled in the last ten years? What does it mean to teach as land and wealth are increasingly redistributed to the top of class pyramid, while large majorities see their lives and futures becoming more unstable and insecure? What does it mean to teach when studies by the world’s leading scientists warn that the we are close to irreversible climate breakdown? What does it mean to teach when superstorms, mega draughts, wildfires, loss of biodiversity, and species extinction proliferate and therein expose growing asymmetries of responsibility and vulnerability across communities?
Crucially, the special issue seeks contributions that reflect not only on these contours of dread, but on the persistence of teaching. How does teaching endure despite dread? How does teaching persist and what is the role of teaching in a moment where the old world is dying and the new one we need has yet to be born? How does teaching remain vital against historical amnesia and the pernicious myth that solidarity is either a pathology, or a dangerous fantasy? How might teaching be retained and rethought as a creative force for imagination over fatalism, reciprocity over exploitation, thought over fundamentalism, belonging over atomization, love over nihilism, mutuality over narcissism, care over hatred, joy over despair, democracy over fascism, and hope over dread? How does teaching enact the future? What new stories of teaching might be told?
