Unschooled Futures

Pluriversal Speculations

Dr Petra Mikulan editor Dr Nathalie Sinclair editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:19th Mar '26

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Unschooled Futures cover

Provokes conversations about a future where learning is not confined by the carceral logic of academic disciplinary boundaries and brick and mortar walls.

This volume stages a series of radical provocations that seek to reorient the very conditions under which learning becomes thinkable. Refusing the redemptive pull of schooling as a salvageable public good, the collection foregrounds the necessity of undisciplining education, dislodging it from its colonial grammars, disciplinary enclosures, and anthropocentric imaginaries.

Schools, far from neutral spaces of knowledge transmission, are infrastructural technologies of late capitalist governance: disciplining bodies, managing time, and sustaining the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands under the guise of progress and order. Drawing from grotesque materialisms, Indigenous epistemologies, and speculative philosophies, the volume positions pluriversal indeterminacy as a generative ontological condition, contesting the closure-driven logics of Western educational taxonomy. If schools operate as entropy-displacement machines, maintaining systemic stability through the externalization of collapse, then what is required is not critique alone, but a methodological insurgency capable of abolishing education’s epistemic foundations. To this end, contributors—traversing anthropology, architecture, mathematics, biology, Indigenous studies, art, philosophy, and literature—articulate a constellation of non-disciplined pedagogical experiments that emerge from the current unraveling of education itself. Through deliberate acts of epistemic undoing, authors inhabit a space where fixed categories, such as human/nonhuman, past/future, knowledge/ignorance are rendered inoperative, making room for learning that reconfigures the possible.

It is never enough to say, “long live the pluriverse!”. The pluriverse must be made. And it must be made endlessly, collectively unschooling our practices of imagination and unmaking the modern world at every turn. Teeming with insurgent ideas and speculative propositions, this thought-provoking book opens up multiple paths. -- Martin Savransky, Reader in Social and Environmental Thought, University of Bath, UK
Unschooled Futures invites readers into the “pluriverse,” where learning is not a fixed path but a generative, unfinished process—one that studies with in a practice of mutual experimentation and refusal. In doing so, it invites us to linger in the unfinished, to see possibility in the mess, and to join in the ongoing work of reimagining learning otherwise. -- Marquis Bey, Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, Northwestern University, USA

ISBN: 9781350528604

Dimensions: 236mm x 156mm x 22mm

Weight: 620g

304 pages