Why do philosophy now??? This is one of the questions I will dig into in my keynote talk at the upcoming 2026 International Network of Philosophy of Education (INPE) conference. Excited to think with all of the fine folks with the Faculty of Education at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), who will be hosting the event, as well as all of the other educational philosophers travelling to Montreal for this year’s conference, titled Initiating New Conversations Across a Divided World.
Here’s a taste of what I will try to unpack…
In Defense of Study: Counter-Sorceries for Non-Fascist Pedagogical Life
What is philosophy of education for under conditions increasingly organized against study? Or, perhaps a better question, what might philosophy still do, here and now? As universities shutter humanities programs while investing in AI infrastructures that promise to know us before we know ourselves; as reality television, social media, and machine learning school us in the arts of optimization, self-monetization, and sole survival; as tech billionaires increasingly script educational futures while anti-intellectualism is repackaged as common sense; as genocide is livestreamed alongside productivity hacks and wellness routines; as every crisis—personal or planetary—arrives pre-packaged with solutions (made just for me!) that script what to do, what to think, what to feel, who to become, it has become increasingly difficult not only to think differently, but to desire differently.
Situated here, and drawing together recent experiments in what I call weird pedagogy, this performance-lecture responds to the conference call by wagering that philosophy's task today is not merely to initiate new conversations across a divided world, nor to defend education as we know it, but to cultivate the fragile conditions under which collective study remains possible. Thinking aloud with you, I want to work through a series of vexing questions, which are not difficult because they resist understanding, but because they resist, and perhaps even repel, some of education's favourite charms: reassurance, recognition, betterment, and the promise that everything can still be made right. Questions whose force is less epistemological than existential, bringing with them a sense of shame because they implicate the very ways we live, teach, study, and desire. Questions like: Why do philosophy when thought itself increasingly appears to arrive too slow (how quaint), too indulgent (how luxurious), or too absurd (how ridiculous)—a cumbersome practice in a world that promises to think for us? What image of thought has education, as a discipline, inherited that makes thinking feel so shameful precisely when it might be most necessary? And how does this image of thought become part of education's desiring-machines? How, if we take Deleuze and Guattari at their word, do ‘we’ come to desire our own repression? (And who is this ‘we,’ anyways!?) Through what ordinary seductions does radical difference become smoothed over, domesticated, and, at its limit, exterminated—while certainty comes to feel intimate, optimization comforting, and control indistinguishable from care? What kinds of pedagogical experiments might break these spells, estranging the desires through which fascist life continually reproduces itself?
Bringing Deleuze and Guattari's micropolitics of desire into conversation with traditions of fugitive and abolitionist study, I explore how today's weird educational ecology of exhaustion, algorithmic intimacy, and distributed control becomes fertile ground for microfascisms—not simply as political formations, but as ordinary pedagogical habits that shape what we come to want, fear, and take to be possible. Revisiting Deleuze's call for “new weapons,” I will experiment with doing educational philosophy as a practice of pedagogical counter-sorcery: a collective craft of entering into strange pacts, composing minor relays, and inventing heretical fabulations through which non-fascist pedagogical life might be resingularized.
