The Department of Art Education is thrilled and proud to announce that Dr. jessie beier has been appointed as assistant professor in a tenure-track appointment as of May 15 2024. Many of you know Dr. beier in her current role as assistant professor (LTA) and we are very fortunate to continue to learn from and leverage her innovative teaching, research, research-creation and apprenticeship practices.
philoSOPHIA 2024: Messaging the Future + Research at the Sonic Brink
Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing is the 17th meeting of philoSOPHIA, a society for continental feminism. We’ll be meeting as a hybrid conference on Treaty 7 Territory in southern Alberta, hosted by Mount Royal University’s Library in Calgary, Canada on March 14-17, 2024.
Messaging the Future: Lathe-Cut Records as Time Travelling Device (w/ Owen Chapman)
In this workshop, we will work together to plan, craft and then record short messages to the future, which, using our trusty Masco RK-5 portable “suitcase cutter” record lathe, will be cut onto polycarbonate records that, fortunately and unfortunately, will persist long after “us” — some 200 years into the future (depending on storage conditions). Working through this process together, we hope to explore a range of weird philosophical questions about (all-too-linear forms of) temporality and (plastic) futurity, about the materiality of sonic expression (only some of which we can hear), and about the limits, but also potentials, of the very desire, and thus ambition, to message the future.
Making, Doing and Sensing at the Sonic Brink: Paper Presentation
This performance-lecture aims to experiment, and potentially break with, the figure of the horizon and its standardized modes of perception in order propose a counter-gesture, through a figure I call the sonic brink. Opposed to the linear, individual and correlational geometries that undergird optical horizons, the sonic brink is a speculative diagram that resituates questions of perception, thinkability and agency in relation to aural intrusions, collective resonances, immanent noise, and, ultimately, sound refusal. The aim here is to not only talk about what sound can do, but to deploy sound as philosophical material in its own right. As such, this performance-lecture aims to practice weird forms of sonic thinking as just one mode of reorienting approaches to feminist making, doing, and sensing.
Public Talk - Accessible Pedagogies for the “End Times”: Work, Energy, Sustainability
Accessible Pedagogies for the “End Times”: Work, Energy, Sustainability
What is the work of accessible pedagogy given the convergence of crises in which education is situated today? Taking this question as a starting point, this talk outlines an approach to accessible pedagogy that centres work, energy and sustainability in order to develop an intersectional and critical disability framework for rethinking inclusive art education practices.
New Article - No Going Back: Un-Fixing the Future of De-Extinction
New article out now in Animal Studies Journal — Access via your institution and/or reach out for a PDF!
Abstract: ‘Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world’ proclaims the Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences website, adding, ‘And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it’. For Colossal, this involves combining the science of genetics with ‘the business of discovery’ in order to bring back the woolly mammoth, which will not only help ‘rewild’ lost habitats, but also contribute toward ‘making humanity more human’. De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence, often with the goal of reintroducing species to the wild and restoring ecosystems. While still in its nascent state, the science of de-extinction is currently expanding and advancing through, for instance, projects like Colossal’s, raising numerous ethical, social and technological debates about what defines a species, and thus its regeneration; how such definitions shape conservation paradigms; and, ultimately, what we mean when we talk about life, death and species extinction. With their commitment to ‘reversing climate change’ while also ‘advanc[ing] the economies of biology and healing through genetics’, Colossal’s work has not only been deemed ‘game-changing’ in terms of “saving” endangered species, but also in terms of ‘future proofing’ the environment by reshaping how the world thinks about the power of genetics for solving pressing challenges in the life sciences today, including the challenge of extinction. In this de-extinction example, then, the problem of extinction is actualized in relation to solutions aimed at enacting further control over the planet, this time by ‘rewinding’ and ‘reversing’ ecological destruction, so as to fix the human-caused disaster, and in so doing, fix the future. In this essay, I trace the line between ‘the business of discovery’ and ‘making humanity more human’ in order to draw out what I see as some of the broader refrains and fixations that have come to infect future-oriented ecological discourse in these times of dying. Looking to the example of Colossal, I examine the ways in which extinction, and the corollary project of de-extinction, has become at once a territorializing force that works to re-install monohumanist fantasies of planetary control, and a potentially deterritorializing force for letting go and giving up.
Out Now! Pedagogy at the End of the World
Out Now! Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures
This book interrogates the ways in which “end of the world” thinking has come to define and delimit pedagogical approaches in Anthropocene times. Chapters unfold through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity—sustainable futures, energy futures, working futures—each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical unthinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on unthought educational trajectories. Specifically, the book is oriented towards the creation of pedagogical concepts that work to problematize and resituate questions of educational futurity in relation to the planetary realities raised by today’s pressing extinction events. It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental pedagogical anti-model, a speculative program for the unprogrammable that seeks to counter-actualize potentials of and for unthinking pedagogy at the (so-called) end of the world.
Access via your institution and/or reach out for a PDF!
Praise for Pedagogy at the End of the World
Nothing might seem more worthy than a pedagogy that saves the world. Nothing might seem more impossible than a pedagogy in end times. Beier’s Weird Pedagogy challenges the assumptions of futurity embedded in the philosophy and practice of education in order to forge a pedagogy that embraces the challenges of twenty-first century disruptions. Rather than simply coping with end times, Weird Pedagogy creates a new theory of time and education. Beier’s timely and stimulating book is essential reading for those working in philosophy of education, and in Extinction/Anthropocene studies.
Claire Colebrook, Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Pennsylvania State University, US, and author of The Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 and Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 (Open Humanities Press 2014)
If educational theory and philosophy had its own ‘X-Files’, it might look something akin to Beier’s reorientation of education to the weird. In this remarkable book, Beier accomplishes the difficult task of subtracting educational thought from its normative foundations, revealing in turn much stranger conditions for thinking and doing education. An important book and singular contribution to educational thought.
Jason Wallin, Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum, University of Alberta, Canada, and author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2010)
Beier’s radical new mapping of pedagogy both deconstructs the powers and pleasures of pedagogy, while creating strange and optimistic futures for how we think and teach the world that can be implemented now as acts of activism and imagination. Beier takes critical ecological and ethical issues to show the urgency of the role of pedagogy in undoing anthropocentric dominance.
Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, UK, and author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury 2020)
New Position at Concordia in Art Education
Excited to join the folks in Art Education at Concordia University this year! As an Assistant Professor, I will be working with pre-service teachers, community art educators, graduate students and colleagues to think about art and its education here in Montreal.
Countering De-Extinction, Unfixing the Future (NAACAS, August 2022)
Jessie Beier: "Countering De-Extinction, Unfixing the Future"
North American Association for Critical Animal Studies (NAACAS), First Biennial Meeting - On Extinction - August 10 - 12, 2022, Toronto, Ontario
a bead, a breath // Collaboration with Carrie Allison
a bead, a breath
Work by Carrie Allison; Curated by Katie Belcher; Access Gallery, Vancouver, 22 Apr to 15 Jul 2023
a bead, a breath is an exhibition that thinks through caregiving, motherhood, stories, and intergenerational connections, with two videos My Moon (2022) and Our Hands, Our Body, Our Spirit (2022), and sculptural work, BEADZ (2023). Video, animation, and sculpture are grounded in the ongoing and ancestral technology of beadwork—set to ambient scores by Jessie Beier. Continuing generations of Indigenous women’s labour, beadwork mirrors both craft and new media practices in its repetition, rhythm, and storytelling. Carrie Allison says, it “is an act of care, of giving time to, and getting to know; beading is spending time with your ancestors through the shared gesture of sewing and beading.” - Katie Belcher
No Outsides: Metal in an Era of Contagion
June 6–9 2023, Concordia University, Montreal /Tiohtià:ke, Canada
Six decades from its counter-cultural inception, what remains of metal’s relation to the outside forces of extremity, abolition and transformation? The 2023 ISMMS conference, which will be hosted by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, students and artists, will explore this question through a series of talks, artistic interventions, panels and workshops. Oriented toward the question of metal study’s relationship to the outside in an era of contagion, this conference will explore questions related to themes of urgency and emergency, extremity and enclosure, contagion and containment, plurality and polarization, queerness and ecological outsides, and futurity and fatality.
CSSE 2023: Reimagining Science and Education in the Anthropocene
CSSE Conference - May 27-June 1, 2023 - York University - Toronto, Canada
This symposium invites a transdisciplinary discussion about reimagining education in the geologic and political times often referred to as the Anthropocene (a term that is uneven in its affects and has its own politics and history). It brings together the work of educators and researchers from many different locations and disciplines in an effort to meet the CSSE 2023 call for reimaginings and reconfigurations of education for justice and the flourishing of all life.
Jessie Beier — Black Hole Sustainability
In this presentation/provocation, I will respond to the questions posed, and then pose a few more, via a short speculative study of what I call “black hole sustainability.” My own take will approach the tensions raised by the Anthropocene, and more specifically the affirmative relaunching of post-Anthropocene educational futurity, by situating the panel questions in relation to education and the problem of sustainable futures. In a move to enact a resituating of (science) education, I bring the (purported) problem of educational futurity in contact with the computational imaging of a black hole so as to develop a weird pedagogy of endurance — a black hole sustainability - that might be capable of upending education’s unquestioned salvation narratives so as to navigate horizonless futures. Taking off from this example, I will raise questions about the potentials, but also limitations, of speculative practice in and as educational research.
Emergency Signals: Hearing Energy, Listening For Repair @ ReVerb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space
The SpokenWeb Research Network is hosting the 2023 SpokenWeb Research Symposium on the theme of "Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space" at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada from May 1-3, 2023. The conference theme — "reverb" — invites participants to reflect on how sound is situated, transformed, and territorialized through physical, cultural, historical, and political spaces.
Session 9a: Emergency Signals: Hearing Energy, Listening For Repair
Tuesday, May 2, 2;45-4:15 MDT; Panelists: Jessie Beier (Concordia U), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta), Mark Simpson (U Alberta)
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. The panel presentation will introduce the various sonic dimensions and dynamics of the E.E.R.K. so as to explore the import of sound for the reckoning of energy and its emergencies.
For more information and to register for the symposium, visit the conference website here.
Weird Pedagogy for the "End Times"
Dr. Jessie Beier joins that latest installment of the CSLP Speaker Series on Wednesday, March 8, at 4pm in the Research-Creation space of the CSLP, for a performance-lecture that will examine the way in which end of the world thinking has come to define and delimit pedagogical approaches to grappling with the material and conceptual ends that might otherwise provoke important questions about education and its futures.
Please be sure to register your attendance as soon as possible through EventBrite.ca.
Orphan Film Symposium - Live Score (w/ Vivek Venkatesh) for Rafael de Luna Freire's "Films by Esdras Baptista"
Rafael de Luna Freire (Fluminense Federal U) presentation at Orphans Symposium 2022: Counter-Archives — Cinematographer Esdras Baptista’s Film Collection (1940s-80s): Rediscovering a Brazilian Communist Filmmaker with music performed live by Vivek Venkatesh & Jessie Beier.
Albertan high school students are artists-in-residence at Concordia’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance
Postdocorate researcher Jessie Beier connects Landscape of Hope with the Bennett, Argyll, and Metro learning centres in Edmonton
Read more here.
Two Nights of Spellbound Performances: Halka at St-Jax Church
On October 14th and 15th, over a hundred Montrealers gathered at St-Jax Church for Halka, a musical performance project born from several years of artistic collaboration between Vivek Venkatesh, David Hall, Owen Chapman, and Norwegian progressive metal legend Enslaved’s co-founder Ivar Bjørnson.
Read more here.
HALKA Performance @ St. Jax Oct. 14/15
Halka is a musical project born from several years of artistic collaboration between Vivek Venkatesh, David Hall, Owen Chapman, and Norwegian progressive metal legend Enslaved’s co-founder Ivar Bjørnson. They will be joined by Jessie Beier, Annabelle Brault, Danji Buck-Moore, José-Luis Cortés Santander, Martin Lalonde, and Veronica Florence Mockler for two different sound and multimedia performances at the St Jax church on 14-15 October 2022.
Special guests of the show include Leila Abdul-Rauf and Le Monastère Cabaret de Cirque.
Halka means gentle and subtle in Urdu. Through Halka, we explore the ethos of slow and purposeful creation. What does it mean to be gentle in the face of harshness? How lightly do we need to be to float and yet feel anchored?
Landscape of Hate Residency @ 4th Space
2022, August 8-19// Landscape of Hate Artist Residency @ 4th Space, Concordia University, Montreal.
Landscape of Hate performances include a combination of original compositions of electronic music, audio samples, social media feeds, soundscapes and video projections. The lyrical materials are derived from data collected from the Internet, research interviews and other public sources.
This event features artists Jessie Beier, Annabelle Brault, Owen Chapman, Nik Forrest, Veronica Mockler, José-Luis Cortés Santander, and Vivek Venkatesh, with production assistance from Marek Detière-Venkatesh, Nathan-Gabriel Guerrette, Catlin W. Kuzyk, and Mairin Miller.
Ahuman Pedagogy Book // Out Now!
“What the world needs now, in the Anthropocene, is an Ahuman Pedagogy, one that de-centers the hu-man, and challenges the eco-political and aesthetic situation of education today. This is an important book, because it is a machine of/for change…plug in!”
—Bernd Herzogenrath, Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and editor of Film as Philosophy and Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach
“This is shock therapy for business-as-usual education, and a maze: As one door slams in my face, another one opens next to it. All contributions in this remarkable volume will not appeal to everyone, but they certainly won’t leave anyone unaffected. Together, they redirect education to confront its own premises in impossible times.“
—Helena Pedersen, Department of Pedagogical, Curricular, and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and author of Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education
This book brings together a collection of multi-disciplinary voices to discuss, debate, and devise a series of ahuman pedagogical proposals that aim to address the challenging ecological, political, social, economic, and aesthetic milieu within which education is situated today. Attending to contemporary calls to decenter all-too-human educational research and practice, while also coming to terms with the limits and inheritances through which such calls are made possible in the first place, this book aims to interrogate, but also invent, what the editors call an ahuman pedagogy. Organized in three main sections—Conjuring an Ahuman Pedagogy, Machinic Re/distributions, and Non-pedagogies for Unthought Futures—this multi-disciplinary experiment in ahuman pedagogies for the age of the Anthropocene offers an experimental—albeit always speculative and incomplete—series of pedagogical proposals that work to unthink and counter-actualize educational futures-as-usual.
Beier, J. & jagodzinski, j. (Eds.). (2022). Ahuman pedagogy: Multidisciplinary perspectives for education in the Anthropocene. London/New York: Palgrave MacMillan.