Pedagogies of Conviviality
Photo by Cindy Lee
Convivere (It. v. int.): to live together. From languages of Latin descent, conviviality literally means with-live. In this inheritance, conviviality blurs tangible and intangible dimensions of pedagogy. It manifests through the atmospheric expansion of affect and through multifarious visitations not commonly associated with the pedagogical. Such an idea of pedagogy stands in resistance to instrumental and managerial logics in education. It does so provocatively, by bringing vitality and life into what Alain Badiou (2009) describes as the “atonal world”—a world without a tone. In pedagogies of conviviality, pedagogy cannot be a mere conceptual ornament. Rather, it calls for attention (through intention) to be given to how the familiar is seen from new perspectives, and it desires to create conditions for the emergence of new forms of ethical gatherings, of new forms of convivre.
Pedagogies of conviviality exist as an experimental practice in creating conditions for encounters and gatherings that want to invent the new relational economies of new ways of being together. Through economies of misrecognition, of invention, pedagogies of conviviality stage rupture where the incomprehensible has positive value and ignorance is the vector of truth.
Pedagogies of conviviality subsist at the places where meetings fail, where the only fit is misfit, where conviviality is a response not to norm, but to the norm of the absence in norms, which grounds normativity itself. Pedagogies of conviviality emerge from emplaced inessentiality, from that which refuses the demand of efficiencies or of empirical self-identicality. Pedagogies of conviviality resource the aporetic a-temporality of hiatus and caesura to instantiate time in new modalities, heralded by new subjects in the quotidian immediacy of the new worlds that inhere in those we know, in our knowing itself. The convivial is a reverberant echo of a pulse from behind the closed door of the present—its pedagogy performs a flight, straight into its pursuit of us, straight into us.
Cristina D. Vintimilla
References:
Badiou, A. (2009). Logics of worlds: being and event II. Alberto Toscano (tr.), New York: Continuum.
Acknowledgments:
The experimental materialization of this form of pedagogy wouldn’t be possible without the openness of the educators and children at Capilano University Children’s Centre.
The theoretical unfolding of the pedagogies of conviviality have benefit from the rich and multiple dialogical encounters with Graham Giles (see indiscern.wordpress.com) …Always grateful…
Cristina D. Vintimilla