Activism as technology of the posthuman self: towards a more relevant school

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the field of student activism in relation to the school. In an age marked by ecological, economic and technological change, and where certainties based on Humanism and anthropocentricism continue to be eroded, this paper explores possibilities for reintegrating the school as meaningful to the ethico-political development of students. Activism is positioned in this paper as a means by which students can actualise their ethico-political agency in relation to the self, others and the world. This paper therefore urges school leaders to recognise the potential of knowledge generated through affirmative youth activism and to find a space for this knowledge within the school. This is particularly important within a context of growing youth disillusionment with formal schooling and its inadequate response to the crises of our age. This paper theoretically develops a relational space within the school for the “offical” knowledge of this education to be brought into meaningful political conversation with the “minor” knowledge generated through youth activism. These theorisations will be supported by case studies taken from the empirical literature on youth activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Student empowerment
• activism
• student school relationship
• political socialisation
• posthuman knowledge
• environmental education

Introduction

This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution around schooling and activism, arguing for the recognition of activist knowledge within the school. This paper is interested in furthering this knowledge with regard to the formation of the ethico-political self. It does this within a posthuman historical context, where certainty wanes in the face of the convergence between posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). This convergence is increasingly leading to the erosion of oppositional logic and binary distinctions central to European enlightenment thought (such as human/non-human; nature/culture, etc.) and on which the “modern” school is founded (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022). Therefore, any established order stemming from disciplinary practices of the previous century and early twenty-first century, or any hierarchy or relationship within truth regimes, loses significance in a posthuman global reality marked by ecological, economic and technological change within “the posthuman predicament” (Braidotti, 2019); being positioned as we are between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction. Within the current crisis of subjectivity (Foucault, 1986), activism emerges as a viable option for personal and collective ethical care in response to the posthuman predicament, involving practices from protests to social media engagement and student political commitment. Activist knowledge generation therefore has the potential to reintegrate the school as meaningful and relevant within the student’s ethico-political formation.

This is important within the context of increasing student alienation from formal schooling. This is demonstrated in England through increasing absenteeism (Macmillan & Anders, 2024) and the growth of home-schooling since the Covid-19 pandemic (Hattenstone, 2024). Even before Covid-19, Smyth (2012) highlighted how under the neoliberalisation of education, students in increasing numbers were “switching off emotionally, relationally and intellectually” (p. 179), with Ball and Collet-Sabé (2022, p. 987) now stating that the “modern” school has become “intolerable and irredeemable” and should be abandoned. There has, however, been some push-back against this notion of abandonment (Means, 2024). This paper therefore looks to see how the school can recognise and pedagogicalise the “general antagonism” of constituent power (Means, 2024) generated through youth activism, as a means through which the school can facilitate a way toward ethico-political significance in the lives of students. This paper will suggest the school’s meso-level space as a space where “offical knowledge” (Apple, 2013) can be brought into conversation with the “minor knowledge” (Braidotti, 2019) generated through youth activism.

Youth activism as political activity beyond the ballot box has become increasingly visible over recent decades. This direct form of political action can be seen in a diverse range of movements focussed on environmental issues, social justice, gender and racial justice, cultural rights, human rights, calls for democratisation, resistance to austerity measures and recognition of indigenous peoples (Fominaya, 2014; Pickard, 2022; Purcell, 2002) in “moments and movements of convergence” (Rocheleau, 2015, p. 75). These moments and movements – frequently youth led – often converge in resistance to the “increasing functional integration of all people and places into a single, laissez-faire, and capitalist world economy” (Purcell, 2002, p. 99) and the “opportunistic commodification of all that lives” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 13) through an inequitable globalisation (Purcell, 2002) based on “major” knowledge founded on Euro-centric Humanism and anthropocentrism. We can contextualise these movements within a growing realisation that “universal” positions based on Humanism and anthropocentrism have not delivered in regard to political utopias and emancipatory drives, and are now also failing to meet the challenges posed by high technological mediation and ecological disaster. In response, youth dissent is becoming increasingly expressed through actions ranging from symbolic acts to political mobilisation (O'Brien et al., 2018).

However, the literature can sometimes overlook the activism of school-based students (Miller, 2023) and the shared learning potential of activism. Its capacity for knowledge production within education can also be under-recognised (Choudry, 2015) and becomes a “missed opportunity” (Trott et al., 2023). This knowledge production is conceptualised here as potential “posthuman knowledge production” (Braidotti, 2019) because activism can be seen as localised but also transversal, inspired by multiple and complex connections, allowing travel between many grounded and embodied positions on the activist “map”. Activism therefore generates nomadic knowledge – emerging and decentred – in contrast to the fixed and sedentary disciplinary knowledge of the school, which is founded on a restrictive Humanism and anthropocentrism. Indeed, activism extends knowledge beyond what is available in the school. Activism therefore has the potential to generate “minor” knowledge that can challenge the complacency of “major” knowledge and its response to the crises of our age, so that students encounter knowledge not only as a restrictive ethico-political force of entrapment, but (through “minor” knowledge) also as an affirmative ethico-political force of empowerment; as pontentia rather than just potestas (Braidotti, 2019).

This paper will therefore proceed by firstly outlining its theoretical stance. It will then go on to contextualise how “major” knowledge has been securitised within the modern school before devoting a section to demonstrating how activism as a technology of the posthuman self emerges as a response to this securitisation. After this, a section will look to spatialise this response within (and beyond) the school. The theoretical points made in these sections will be supported by two case studies drawn from the empirical literature. These case studies were chosen because of their differing scales, different locations, and also because they demonstrate the convergence between activism and posthumanism as a means through which students can develop their ethico-political selves through the generation of “minor-knowledge” in middle spaces. Finally, after addressing the post-humanist strand of posthumanism (see section below), the focus will move on to the post-anthropocentric strand of posthumanism in the form of environmental activism, especially with regard to the Fridays for Future movement (fridaysforfuture.org).

Theoretical and case study overview

This paper views student activism through the overarching theory of posthumanism. It is suggested here that we are increasingly witnessing a convergence between activism and the emergent posthuman self, where “the emphasis on affectivity and relationality is an alternative to individualist autonomy” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 12). Posthumanism is therefore a lens through which to see the world and its predicaments (Sidebottom, 2024). There are two central tenets to this theory. The first is a move away from Humanism which has reified the ideal “rational” human of enlightenment “progress”. Posthumanism exposes this conception of Man as a historical construct rather than a “natural law” (Braidotti, 2013). This Humanist notion of “human” is constructed through binaries and hierarchies based on the white, male, Eurocentric, able-bodied, neurotypical, and straight Man and his “others”. These marginalised others include the non-human and those positioned as less-than-human.

The second central tenet is post-anthropocentrism. This stance moves beyond and challenges Man’s exceptionalism and his position as the universal measure of all things (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). It repositions the non-human and non-living in more equal relationships with humans. Contrary to popular belief, posthumanism does not mean less human, but in fact more human, through a greater exploration of the complexities and entanglements of what it means to be human with regard to climate change, economics, politics and technological mediation. Posthumanism therefore moves beyond the “crisis of Man” to “elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 37).

The possibility of posthuman knowledge production then emerges from this broad theoretical framework. According to Braidotti (2019), posthuman knowledge is embodied in lived experiences, embedded in real situations and places, transversal and fluid, relational with people and non-people, and facilitates affirmative action. This is in contrast to the disciplinary knowledge of the modern school. Therefore, posthuman knowledge offers pedagogical choice that moves away from hierarchies and binaries; away from abstract universalism, knowledge stasis and pessimistic acceptance of the way things are; away from the illusion of what Featherstone (2017) describes as an unsustainable neoliberal utopia.

This paper therefore urges school leaders to leverage ruptures in this neoliberal utopia as a way to reengage students meaningfully in school-based education through the school’s middle spaces. Fundamental to posthumanism (and, indeed, activism) is the “minor” (unofficial) knowledge generated from “middle spaces” (Braidotti, 2019). These are the ruptures that activism often leverages in the neoliberal conceptual fabric of “major” (offical) knowledge based on Humanism and anthropocentrism. This paper argues that there is space for this knowledge within the school if school leaders facilitate it, if they recognise their school’s own middle space and its possibilities. It is argued here that this is the school’s meso-level space, which includes its social spaces, website, newsletters, corridors, assemblies, extra-curricular activities, and more. This is in contrast to the government-directed micro-level space (the formal curriculum of disciplinary knowledge) and macro-level space (neoliberal education policy). In this paper, this middle space of the school is theorised using Lefebvre’s (1991) spatial triad, below:

1. Spatial practice, which is the perceived space and embraces production and reproduction and, in the terms of this paper, corresponds to the micro-level space of the formal received curriculum, teaching and learning. This includes all forms of offical disciplinary knowledge. It is the space where datafication of the self is most assertively encouraged. It is where social technologies of power and (re)production are operationalised.

2. Representations of space, which is the conceived (planned) space and takes the form of buildings, policy directives, and such like, and in the terms of this paper corresponds to the macro-level space of national – and often global – neoliberal education policy – or governance – based on Humanistic universal conceptions of “Man” and anthropocentric exceptionalism. It is the normalised “ideology of no ideology”, of restrictive potestas that infuses the structures of spatial practice and looks to securitise this practice.

3. Representational spaces which are the lived, everyday spaces that for this paper could find their most authentic expression in the meso-level space of institutional ethos and its attendant social spaces. It is this school space that has the potential to be activated as a rhizomatic space for active and affirmative “nomadic becoming” in the relational ethico-political formation of the self; for pontentia, empowerment.

It is theorised here that the school’s meso-level space – its representational and lived space – is the space where the posthuman subject can authentically emerge and where the important question posed by Braidotti (2019) in our posthuman age (What kind of human am I?) can be most authentically addressed within school space. This meso-level space is where Foucault’s (2020a) social technologies of power and production (operating at the macro and micro levels of formal education, at the levels of spatial practice and representations of space, of disciplinary knowledge and government education policy) can be ruptured in favour of a technology of the self. This technology of the self is defined as “the government of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others” (Foucault, 2020b, p. 88).

Two case studies have been selected to demonstrate and develop the theoretical points under discussion throughout this paper. The first case study is from Brazil as researched by Miller (2023). This is where, over 2015–2016, hundreds of schools were occupied by students in protest at the neoliberalization and militarisation of schooling. They protested against outsourcing, privatisation, austerity measures, cuts to education spending, and the “depoliticization” of schooling through a government bill designed to facilitate the programme “School without Party” (Escola Sem Partido, ESP). This bill was aimed at censoring discussions on gender and sexuality, racism, critical sociology and philosophy, and social struggle within Brazilian schools. Importantly, students took action to address their ethico-political alienation from school space. As Miller (2023, p. 652) writes of this activist movement: “During the occupations, students experimented with new pedagogical forms that attempted to go beyond their formal schooling experience to overcome this kind of alienation”.

The second case study is taken from England, from an ethnographic study by Bright (2012). Here, disaffected young people, alienated from schooling in a “post-industrial space of ruin”, look to challenge hegemonic policy through their localised activism centred on “resistant aspiration”, a counter-value framework. These young people, with the assistance of an acclaimed film director within a non-school support setting, produced a film focussed on their lives. This film allowed them to speak back to the hegemonic discourse of aspiration through their own authentic voices, their own embodied and embedded realities that connected and resonated with other students in the area when the film was shown in the district’s secondary schools.

Context: the securitisation of the school episteme

While mass schooling has never been democratic (although historically, moves would sometimes be made in this direction), it can certainly become less democratic (Apple et al., 2022; Holloway, 2021; Kulz, 2021) and more authoritarian (Hursh, 2019; Reay, 2022; Clarke & Lyon, 2023). This seems to be especially true now, where room for staff and student agency has been greatly curtailed (Kelly, 2009) during the transition into the discourse, practices and subjectivities of the neoliberal experiment – “an unqualified disaster for young people” (Smyth, 2012) – and a marketised education system (Ball, 2012) centred on Foucault’s technologies of production and power (discipline); what Ball and Collet-Sabé (2022) describe as “the modernist truth of schooling”. It is argued here that this school episteme is increasingly losing legitimacy as a foundation for a response to the posthuman predicament. Young people, too, are beginning to realise this, as demonstrated through their more assertive activism, of which a particularly striking example is the Brazilian mass school occupations in case study 1.

Despite this growing legitimacy-deficit, there has been a securitisation of schooling over recent decades that has looked to secure this school episteme – the regime of truth – and systematically lock-in the inequalities that flow from this neoliberal imaginary. These inequalities impact not only humans (and those positioned as less-than-human), but non-humans as well. Indeed, in England, this neoliberal imaginary has been securitised through statutory guidance (DfE, 2022) that effectively acts as a way of blocking critiques of neoliberal capitalism by regulating the political as something distinct from the “neutral” Humanistic and anthropocentric school. In short, the “depoliticised” school (shaped by government ideology through the representations of space) is allowed to be presented as neutral and objective: other (critical) views are to be viewed as “political”. This in turn takes away the possibility of activating “alternative views of the subject against the dominant vision” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 12).

This anti-democratic securitisation of schooling has intensified following the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In the case of England, wide-ranging education reform (Granoulhac, 2017; Leach et al., 2023) was introduced in the long aftermath of the banking crisis, when neoliberalism appeared to be very vulnerable. This neoliberal reform of education is evident throughout the world (Ball, 2012; Robertson et al., 2012). These reforms – the continuing marketisation of education – are conceived in the representations of space (of government policy) and enacted through the school’s spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991). That is to say, neoliberal ideology is sustained through an exclusionary and now normalised “objective” and “offical” knowledge within the classroom: the regime of truth (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022), thus sustaining the “neoliberal human” of the neoliberal utopia.

This can be seen quite clearly, for example, in the student activism of case study 1, where students rebelled against the political quietism being forced upon them at school through the Brazilian government’s “School without Party” programme. This enforced political quietism was intrinsically linked to the government’s neoliberal education reforms. Also, in case study 2, we see how the individualised neoliberal conception of self-serving aspiration now dominates in England, where success and failure are individualised and those who do not meet the standards of Humanism’s “ideal” human (or the neoliberal human) are labelled – in one young person’s words taken from the study – a “waste o’ space” (Bright, 2012, p. 231).

Fundamental to the securitisation of schooling through political quietism and the “ideology of no ideology” (Stetsenko, 2020, p. 727) is the datafication of the self. This is where students are structurally-coerced into constituting themselves as datafied selves (or as Braidotti, 2019, terms it, “quantified selves”) in order to achieve individual success with regard to acquiring “major” knowledge. Students, within the school technologies of power and productivity (Foucault, 2020a), learn to constitute themselves through attainment data, attendance data, behaviour data, progress 8¹ scores and so forth, so that this data is “now implicit in the subjectivation of students” (Selwyn et al., 2022, p. 347). Students are increasingly required to construct themselves in the abstract rather than as embodied and embedded ethico-political agents. They are required to see themselves through the “neutrality” of abstract numbers. It is no coincidence that in England, GCSE² grades have been changed to numerical scores. The “neutrality” of numbers hides the political ideology behind them. Data is collected and stored on learning management systems, online tests and surveys, classroom apps and other tools that support data generation and analysis (Selwyn et al., 2022), to be used in the abstract space of policy decisions and ideological direction.

This technological mediation of the self (indeed, within what some have termed the technocene – a significant aspect of the posthuman predicament) further removes the student away from their embodied and embedded realities (and the embodied and embedded realities of others) towards a disembodied understanding of themselves and others (whether human or non-human) and towards an abstract and digitalised neoliberal Humanism and anthropocentrism, focussed on individualised success and atomised aspiration. This occurs within the wider datafication of education (Holloway, 2021) or the government of education through numbers (Grek, 2009). What we see here is the convergence of data with “offical” and “major” knowledge. We are seeing in fact a digitalisation of governmentality (Souto-Otero & Beneito-Montagut, 2016) within a data-knowledge convergence; a digitalisation of technologies of production and power. This digitalised abstract space is increasingly the space where students are governed and self-governed. Datafication facilitates standardisation, and this standardisation facilitates standardisation of knowledge – of thought – of the neoliberal imaginary.

This neoliberal data-knowledge convergence leaves little time and space available for the lived self-formation of the ethico-politcal self within the school. In case study 2, this is demonstrated through a group of students’ alienation from school, where they have moved away from “school space” and its technologies of power and production into marginal (and marginalised) spaces beyond the school’s Humanistic gaze and its hegemonic understandings of aspiration. It is in these marginal spaces that these students can resist the abstraction of the self in the school’s spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991) and can generate knowledge founded on lived experience and embodied history. In short, it is where they can produce a lived and representational space (Lefebvre, 1991), which they later captured on film.

When activism does occur in our schools, for example in the recent Greta Thunberg inspired school strikes, government and education stakeholders (such as National Association of Headteachers in England) are often quick to condemn this activism (Barrance, 2020) – this rupture in the neoliberal fabric. This is also demonstrated through government ministers condemning Black Lives Matter activism in English schools, as well as decolonising the curriculum movements (Wood, 2020). In case study 1, it is evident in the Brazilian government’s deployment of the police and its hostility to activist students (Miller, 2023). This leaves students in a “double-bind” (McGimpsey et al., 2023) between their ethico-political imaginations and the need to pursue individual success through the digitalised data-knowledge convergence which demands structural and conceptual obedience within the school’s spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991). Subsequently, “minor” knowledge generated through activism is further marginalised within – or excluded from – “school space”, a space which is presented as “neutral” and objective. But as Lefebvre (1991, 2009a) argues, space is never “innocent” or free from political ideology. The production of space “serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power”. The “ideology of no ideology” (Stetsenko, 2020, p. 727) only superficially disguises this.

Activism as technology of the emerging posthuman self

It should come as no surprise, then, that many students look to escape the school’s pedagogical securitisation founded on technologies of production and power rehearsed in our schools today. For students who are experiencing environmental crisis, accelerating technological change, cultural and political securitisation (for example, in England, through policies such as Prevent³ and Fundamental British Values⁴), sexism, poverty, racism, homophobia, pandemic legacies, austerity, debt, war, and the return of the nuclear threat, activism provides alternative knowledge-producing spaces (Choudry & Kapoor, 2010; Trott et al., 2023) for students to develop an authentic response to these issues in opposition to the ethico-political quietism forced upon them at school. Activism – through affirmative ethics – entails active political engagement rather than passive acceptance and withdrawal. As Braidotti (2019, p. 181) states: “Affirmative ethics puts the motion back into e-motion and the active back into activism”.

An example of this is seen in case study 1, where students occupied their schools in order to develop an affirmative ethics centred on education. This involved re-politicising the school as a dynamic space for developing anti-neoliberal, anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist knowledge (Miller, 2023). Here, students developed “a sense of their own agency, reshaping their understandings of themselves and society” (Miller, 2023, p. 650). As one student said, the occupations “opened my eyes to feminism and Brazilian education, about fighting for our rights. I had no idea about that. I always thought that it was an issue that was for adults to solve” (Miller, 2023, p. 650).

Some students are thus actively producing a representational space (Lefebvre, 1991) for the formation of the ethico-political self, between institutional discipline at the micro-level (spatial practice) and limited, disempowering (Threadgold, 2012) or inaccessible choice at the macro-level of party politics (representations of space). It is through activism that many students look to escape the Humanistic and anthropocentric gaze that increasingly forces them to communicate in numerical data, narrowing the range of meaning, of possibility; narrowing “the self”. Some students are therefore leveraging this meso-level space as an opportunity to form one’s political self through resistance and rupture (Beckett et al., 2017; Miller, 2023) of the school episteme and, indeed, a seemingly wider unresponsive political system. As Arya and Henn (2023, p. 106) state: “Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on how many young people actualise their political will and has resulted in a broad rejection of electoral forms of political participation”. This “do-it-ourselves” politics (Pickard, 2022) includes the rejection of the depoliticised self and the datafication of the self. It also opens up the possibility of a posthuman self beyond the reach of the school’s epistemic discipline: the possibility of “conceptual disobedience” (Braidotti, 2019). This is demonstrated very clearly in the Brazilian school occupations. As one student commented: “everything we couldn’t talk about in our normal school days we were able to discuss extensively” (Miller, 2023, p. 653).

This paper frames these rejections of thin democracy for do-it-yourself politics positively and affirmatively within Foucault’s ideas centred on the care of the self and Braidotti’s ideas on the posthuman. Later on in his studies, Foucault began to theorise the body as having the capacity to practice freedom through a practice of the self (2020c) and to “constitute, positively, a new self” (2020a, p. 249) within a technology of the self. This is one social technology within four identified by Foucault (2020a), the others consisting of 1) technologies of production; 2) technologies of sign systems; and 3) technologies of power. These technologies are interrelated but this paper is particularly interested in how activism facilitates the self-constituted self “through techniques of living, not of repression through prohibition and law” (Foucault, 2020b, p. 89). Activism is – it is argued here – a technique of living. Activism can be seen as a “practice of the self”, that is to say, “An exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being” (Foucault, 2020c, p. 282). Young activists in this regard have recognised not only their political alienation in school space but also their agency in being able to seek out (or produce) representational, lived spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) where they can construct their ethico-political selves. In case study 1, this lived space is produced within the school. But for many students, like in case study 2, this lived space must be produced outside of the school. This – for many – diminishes the relevance of schooling to their emerging ethico-political selves, while heightening anxiety around their “crisis of subjectivation” (Foucault, 1986, p. 95).

As Bazzul (2017) points out, the ethics of the self is more than part of an individualised “neoliberal turn” in social life, where students are encouraged to think of themselves as atomised “entrepreneurs” in every aspect of their lives. Rather, as Foucault (1986, p. 95) states:

We need instead to think in terms of a crisis of subjectivation – that is, in terms of a difficulty in the manner in which the individual could form himself as the ethical subject of his actions, and efforts to find in devotion to self that which could enable him to submit to rules and give a purpose to his existence.

For students in securitised schooling, experiencing the “crisis of subjectivation”, this means seeking out those spaces where the formation of the political self is possible; activism, as both a collective and individual enterprise (Pickard, 2022), provides this opportunity. Activism therefore leverages the space between binary choices, between submitting to rules and pursuing the active formation of the self.

Indeed, what these two case studies also highlight is the difficulty in developing the ethico-political self within the school. The Brazilian school occupations eventually came to an end and normal spatial practice was eventually re-established. The marginalised students in the second case study had their film shown in district-wide schools but likely without any permanent space being left open within these institutions for activist knowledge. For most students, then, in most schools, care of the self also means, at times, submitting to disciplinary rules, the depoliticisation and datafication of the self in order to achieve at school. Walking the middle ground can be a difficult balancing act. Or, as Kennelly (2011, p. 3) writes:

The new twenty-first-century “Citizen Youth” needs to know how to do specific forms of activism, while also paradoxically heeding the associated limits of activism, beyond which “good citizens” dare not tread.

Finding a middle space – a lived space – for the self-constituted self would be made considerably easier for students if there was a space in school that did not alienate them from their potential ethico-political selves and the knowledge generated through activism. That is to say, a space that alleviated the “crisis of subjectivation”. This space would welcome activist knowledge because activism offers an escape from the binary choice of participation or withdrawal, allowing students to find “the middle-ground” and their own “middle space” of the self, so that it is not simply a case of whether to participate or abstain from political activity (Foucault, 1986), but rather to participate at one’s own proximity and one’s own chosen forms. It is from these middle spaces that a technology of the self emerges.

This paper develops Foucault’s ideas on the technology of the self further, suggesting that activism provides the possibility for the posthuman self to emerge. This posthuman subject is an evolving “work in progress”, who is “a neo-materialist, grounded thinker of dynamic and complex social and discursive processes, but with a keen eye for issues of social and political justice and a commitment to affirmative ethics” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 46). Through activism – and the middle space it provides – students are able to ask the question posed by Braidotti (2019): What kind of human am I? Within the posthuman predicament, it is a vital question with regard to the care of the self. In both case studies discussed in this paper, Humanism’s conception of the “ideal human” is challenged. In Brazil, it was through a rupture with notions around gender, sexuality, race, and the inequitable hierarchies these impose. In the English example, it was through challenging the hegemonic notion of neoliberal aspiration and the marginalisation of those who do not achieve or share in this ideal, and who become part of the “missing people” (Braidotti, 2019) of the posthuman predicament, whose embodied and embedded realities are ignored in school space.

Activism therefore presents choices in regard to “the political game” that Foucault (1986, p. 94) elaborates on, which is: “The manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject in the entire sphere of social, political, and civic activities”. This means recognising and negotiating the complex and shifting rules of the game concerning command and subordination, and in doing so meeting one’s civic potential. It involves elaborating an ethics which enables one “to constitute oneself as an ethical subject with respect to these social, civic, and political activities, in the different forms they may take and at whatever distance one remained from them” (Foucault, 1986, p. 94). In both case studies addressed in this paper, we see how students have negotiated the “rules of the game” through the production of a middle, representational space when an opportunity arises. In Brazil, students saw an opportunity and dared to go beyond where good citizens “dare not tread”. In England, a group of marginalised students recognised the potential of technology (in this case film) to be something other than just a now normalised means of control: it could be incorporated into activist pedagogy as well. Students found a space for resistance and were able to exercise this resistance through using this media as a technology of the self (Cammaerts, 2015) that escaped neoliberal/Humanistic (self) censorship.

The earlier mention of “forms” and “distance” is therefore an important one. Activism takes on a variety of forms (physical protests, marches, occupations, petitions, fund-raising, art, social media, etc.) and allows for different proximities of engagement with a wide range of political issues (see, for example, Besley, 2005; Cammaerts, 2015; Pickard, 2022; Sloam et al., 2022). Activism allows students entry (at multiple but connecting points) to the “political game”, to the ethico-political self and decentred knowledge production. The school as “gatekeeper” to the political self and securitised knowledge can therefore be circumvented through the rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) space of activism, with its multiple and non-hierarchical entry and exit points. It allows students to test and challenge the limits of the “obligatory or optional, natural or conventional, permanent or provisional, unconditional or recommended only under certain conditions” (Foucault, 1986, p. 94), especially in regard to knowledge production.

However, this escape from the school’s enclosed binary logic remains difficult within school space itself: activism cannot “interrupt” the educational project (Miller, 2023). The issue of school space increasingly losing its relevance to young people – an intolerable and irredeemable space (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022) – remains. This paper therefore hopes to address this by positioning the school’s meso-level space as a space where activism has a place in education, where the school can facilitate (at least in some capacity) “a political and aesthetic project of self-formation” (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022, p. 995).

The meso-level: a potential representational and rhizomatic space

In this paper, the school’s meso-level space corresponds with Lefebvre’s representational spaces which are the lived, everyday social spaces of the institution. It is a space of heterogeneity and difference, at odds with neoliberal “quantitative totalization and systematization” (Lefebvre, 2009b, p. 205). It is argued here that the meso-level (representational) space vacated by neoliberal policies and disciplinary knowledge (that establish relations between central government and micro-level institutional control; see Lingard et al., 2013; Sobe, 2015) can be leveraged as a “rupture” in the neoliberal fabric; as a way of recognising and valuing emerging knowledge. It could in fact be a site of and for emerging knowledge produced through activism.

The objective structures of this meso-level space – such as the institutional newsletter, the open social spaces, corridors, display-boards, reception areas, extra-curricular provision, fieldtrips, assemblies, school websites and so forth – could be extremely important in the democratic production of space as an alternative to political securitisation. In line with the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (2013) on the rhizome (which have in part informed Braidotti’s work on the posthuman), these structures form multiple entryways into the school’s meso-level space, each one a potential node of rhizomatic activism, knowledge production and multiplicity, with “lines of flight” forming a network that becomes part of the larger activist map, connected to the wider political space. As Deleuze and Guattari (2013, p. 27) state in regard to this middle space: “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed”. It is a space where ideas interact and the political is made visible.

Students themselves, and student political movements, occupy this middle space. Writing with regard to the Brazilian school occupations, Miller (2023, p. 4) states that this is because

they exist at intersections of the formal and informal, the institutionalised and experimental, the political and epistemic, the mainstream and radical. Indeed, high schools are even more important in this context as they form the basis of a society’s intergenerational knowledge transmission and social reproduction.

These points around this in-between space can be expanded to correspond to Lefebvre’s representational space. This lived space is “the space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39). This is where people make sense of how the conceived space and the perceived space interact, where meaning and semiotic networks emerge. It is also a space that can resist dominant ideology and imaginaries. Unfortunately, it is also the space that is for the most part experienced passively (Lefebvre, 1991). Instead of this space being experienced passively, this is the space where pedagogical choice could emerge. By utilising the possibilities of this space, routes into “the political game” (Foucault, 1986) could be established through activist knowledge, and where “minor” knowledge could be brought into conversation with “major” knowledge in a more conscious, dialogical and critical form of “intergenerational knowledge transmission”.

This is exampled in both case study 1 and 2. In the Brazilian school occupations, it is demonstrated how an enlarged representational space is established. Education still continued during these occupations: the school still functioned as a site of learning. However, the school’s spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991) of disciplinary knowledge was marginalised in favour of participatory learning. The Humanistic “ideal human” was brought into this lived, representational space and compelled into dialogue. As Miller (2023) notes, learning took place dialogically and often incidentally, within informal classes and prioritising the students’ interests, such as the history of Africa, indigenous Brazilians, slavery and its legacies, and resistance to colonialism: the marginalised “others” of Eurocentric Humanism. As one student stated: “the best model of education was literally the occupation, with the student able to live within it … choosing that which they want to learn” (Miller, 2023, p. 657). As Miller also notes, recognising an education relevant to their lives (their embodied and embedded realities) inspired and motivated the students further. This is an important point for school leaders to recognise with regard to students who in modern schooling are “switching off emotionally, relationally and intellectually” (Smyth, 2012, p. 179).

Furthermore, this enlarged meso-level space soon became a rhizomatic space as students changed the school from its former position as an isolated site of disciplinary knowledge. The students ensured that the school engaged with parents, community members, social movements, philosophical groups, trade unions, and cultural groups, while spreading their radical pedagogies beyond the school and through wider networks they had plugged into (Miller, 2023). Knowledge and learning became relational and transversal – dynamic – and were enabled through this middle space they had produced, a space which is essential to the production of posthuman knowledge (Braidotti, 2019).

In case study 2, we see a different situation arising, where marginalised students managed to gain re-entry to the school through the meso-level space. Their film was shown throughout district schools, outside of normal spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991) within these schools. Their film leveraged the possibilities of the school’s meso-level space, creating – for a moment – a lived, representational space (Lefebvre, 1991) of embodied and embedded realities from a “post-industrial space of ruin” (Bright, 2012). It is argued in this paper that for school leaders to reintegrate the school as relevant to students’ lives again, the structures for doing so already exist or could quite easily be constructed (extra-curricular activities, after-school clubs, websites, etc.) where students can be connected to activist knowledge such as the film produced in case study 2; where instead of this knowledge being marginalised and “lost”, it can be reproduced/repurposed in and for different embodied and embedded realities, so that it becomes transversal and continues to be a “knowledge of becoming”.

Environmental activism and post-anthropocentricism

So far, this paper has focussed on the post-humanist strand of posthumanism. This section will now expand and develop the themes of this paper with a focus on the post-anthropocentric strand of posthumanism. Post-anthropocentricism moves the dial further away from the “ideal” Man as conceptualised through Humanism. Subsequently, this opens up further possibilities for the development of an authentic and relational ethico-political self through the decentring of Humanism’s “human” as the measure of all things (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). This will be demonstrated through the following discussion on environmental/climate change youth activism. Environmental/climate-change activism is perhaps the most prominent form of youth activism today: “an emerging social phenomenon” (Arya & Henn, 2023, p. 98) where young people are “at the vanguard of action on climate change” (Sloam et al., 2022, p. 684). This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated through global school-strike days organised as part of the Greta Thunberg inspired Fridays for Future movement.

This activism must be contextualised within the inadequate neoliberal and anthropocentric response to environmental crises. This response has looked to depoliticise environmental issues through a dominant, hierarchical, and techno-managerial environmental policy frame – a “depoliticised imaginary” (Swyngedouw, 2015) based on a false consensus around neoliberal sustainability. Understandings of the environment within this “consensus” then become a form of governmentality, of managing a (global) population (Foucault, 2020). Worryingly, the public discourse of this “consensus” on climate change and environmental issues seems to have transitioned from one of prevention to one of “catastrophe-management”, or even more reductively, “business-as-usual” in regard to the economy and maintaining the neoliberal social imaginary/utopia. The discourse has perceptively moved away from ecological justice to one of coping and compensation in the continuing “commodification of all that lives” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 13).

This commodification of the natural environment means it has for the most part been transitioned into an abstract space: “a trend toward increasing abstraction and financialization in order to facilitate the global circulation of ‘natural capital’” (Fletcher et al., 2015, p. 359). This can be seen, for example, in abstract carbon credits or species and wetland banking (Fletcher et al., 2015) as the natural world becomes increasingly datafied and digitalised. The organised quantification and datafication of nature through abstract representations of space (Lefebvre, 1991), which are enacted at the level of spatial practice, conceal the politics and ideology of the neoliberal reproduction of nature (i.e. use value and exchange value) through the “illusion of naturalness”. Lefebvre (1991, p. 376) argues that “nature is effectively replaced by powerful and destructive abstractions”.

These abstractions include “reproductions of nature” through which the signs of nature present an idealised natural world (a nature, according to Lefebvre, 1991, that has long since “disappeared”), and one which we allow ourselves to believe still exists; a nature of innocence, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, through “an abstract spatiality as a coherent system that is partly artificial and partly real” (p. 376). This “illusion of natural simplicity” (p. 29) is achieved through spatial practice (the perceived space), such as visiting wildlife havens and national parks (although, unfortunately, the status of these havens can be subject to change, depending on political whims and economic considerations; see for example, Holden, 2019). However, as Swyngedouw (2015) makes very clear, there is no “nature” outside of the political.

But this connection between the natural world and politics is not recognised in education. Rather, it is activist knowledge that recognises and foregrounds this, such as through the Fridays for Future movement. While environmental concerns have become a focus for national and global educational governance at the macro-level (in the promotion of education for sustainable development – ESD is a key sustainable development goal promoted by UNESCO.ORG), and enacted at the micro-level of school spatial practice (disciplinary knowledge), this paper argues that environmental education and sustainable development education are part of a continuing process of political securitisation within/of our schools (see securitisation section above). It is part of the ongoing data-knowledge convergence, of conceptual securitisation, mirroring the wider depoliticisation of environmental issues (see Knutsson, 2020). This is demonstrated in the literature, where it is shown that environmental issues are contained and depoliticised within and through disciplinary knowledge, usually through the STEM subjects (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2019; Trott et al., 2023), as well as Geography (McGimpsey et al., 2023). So while there has been a “quantitative spread of environmental discourses” (for example, through UNESCO education for sustainable development goals), this has occurred “without a qualitative shift” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 125). That is to say, the embodied, embedded and relational realities of lived environmental crises are ignored, sustaining global inequality (Bylund, 2023; Huckle & Wals, 2015).

It is argued here, then, that within securitised schooling and disciplinary knowledge, the datafied self is inserted into an abstract and datafied nature through the data-knowledge convergence. It is increasingly the abstract and “neutral” neoliberal representations of space – especially within the school – that shape our relationship with nature. That is to say, for the most part, we exist in nature in the abstract, through signs and – increasingly – numbers. There is a false sense of safety in numbers – in anaesthetic data (for example, numerical targets around emissions, etc.) – where arm’s length distance can be established between the self and the hidden politics of the natural environment. This neoliberal-humanist-anthropocentric imaginary at once maintains the illusion of nature as objective and “natural” (parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, etc., as something “out there”, distinct and ringfenced from humanity’s politics), while securitised schooling forces students to “live” nature in the depoliticised abstract, through disciplinary knowledge and data which forms part of the governmentality of the modern school, of potestas. The result of this is both the depoliticisation of nature and of the student as “all species are spuriously unified under the imperative of the market economy” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 97).

However, as environmental activism makes clear, to truly live nature is to experience it as a representational and relational space – this means as an ethico-political space. The representational space (representational for both human and non-human) is where an ethico-political relationship can emerge between the self and nature, giving rise to not only a newly constituted self (Foucault, 2020c), but also a newly constituted relationality between human and non-human. Or, to put it another way, the freedom to practice the self with nature, and nature with the self, both individually and collectively. The idea that nature is a political space – and a produced space (by humans and non-humans) – is an important one for the embedded and embodied recontextualization of the self.

It is suggested here, then, that we should not see activism such as Fridays for Future and its associated school strikes just through the lens of environmental protest. Rather, these strikes should be viewed as “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) away from the depoliticisation of the self; away from potestas and the data-knowledge negation of the relational, embodied, and embedded ethico-political self. Fundamentally, youth environmental activism is the practice of pedagogical freedom, for a new learning of the self to emerge. Schools have an opportunity – if they recognise it – to embrace this pedagogical freedom, but only if schools can overcome the false dualism they impose between the “natural” and human environment, between “major” and “minor” knowledge.

According to Ball and Collet-Sabé (2022, p. 990), a key dimension of the modern school episteme is “the clear separation of society and nature”. However, if all space is political (Lefebvre, 1991, 2009a), there should be no separation between “in here” institutional space and “out there” natural space. It is argued here that in order to overcome this dualism imposed by securitised schooling, the meso-level could provide a space for an important response, where a lived curriculum (Brennan et al., 2022) may well emerge within and beyond the school. As a potential rhizomatic representational space, it could link the school into a vast network of environmental activist knowledge where, unlike in the school’s securitised spatial practice, pedagogical choice – and pedagogical production – is available as students look to develop new relational ways of becoming with the non-human in the process of constituting their ethico-political selves and addressing the question: What kind of human am I?

It is in this meso-level space where the abstractions around nature could be “brought down to earth”, as it were, through conversation with “minor” knowledge based on embedded and embodied realities. Here, the veil of “ideology of no ideology” (Stetsenko, 2020) could be stripped away from “official” knowledge. This space would offer students a “legitimate” opportunity to speak back to the “neutral” consensus and environmental governmentality imposed on them, and in turn to develop their posthuman ethico-political selves by introducing “alternative ethical flows” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 172) through activist knowledge. Furthermore, recognising the natural environment as a dynamic political agent (Braidotti, 2019) within the meso-level space invites this agent politically into the school so as to provide this agent with an institutional political voice.

The middle, the plateau

Instead of an end, a conclusion, this paper draws attention once again to the middle, to the emergent, which “avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 22). This space is nomadic, where there is potential for “multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not countable elements and ordered relations” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 588). This paper has identified the school’s meso-level space as a potential representational space (Lefebvre, 1991); a space that could facilitate such multiplicity of becoming and which could resist the data-knowledge convergence. This “becoming”, this formation of the self, implies movement rather than “the sedentary points of view […] of a unitary State apparatus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 24). The reason that activism seems so incongruous in our schools is because it is – by definition – the very opposite of passive and abstract acceptance, of stillness, of quietism, of the sedentary self that is imposed on students through the “modern” school.

Indeed, within the “modernist truth of schooling” (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022, p. 989), it is difficult to make a convincing case for the average state school, with its reproduction of inequality and its rehearsal of discipline, the alienation of a large number of its students, and its limits to thought (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2022). It has been argued here that in order to evolve into something other than an “intolerable and irredeemable” (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022, p. 987) institution of the state, the school must look for “lines of flight” – for movement – that enables students to constitute their ethico-political selves. This does not necessarily involve “epistemological exodus” (Means, 2024) from the school, but rather the actualisation of a dialogical space within the school where “major” and “minor” knowledge can be brought into critical – and political – conversation with each other. This would involve school leaders facilitating an educational space that moves beyond factory-like, input-output understandings of education (Biesta, 2015); and that reaches out beyond the school itself. Activism as a technology of the imminent posthuman self serves this pedagogic function outside of the school. If school leaders and the wider interested community activate their agency, it could serve this function with the school as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A measure to compare a student’s progress with other students who started at a similar level.

2 General Certificate of Secondary Education.

3 Prevent is part of central government’s counter-terrorism strategy where certain authorities (such as schools) look to identify those in danger of being drawn into terrorist-related activities.

4 Fundamental British Values consist of four values to be “actively” promoted in schools as part of central government’s Prevent strategy.