Education, anthropocentrism, and interspecies sustainability: confronting institutional anxieties in omnicidal times

ABSTRACT

Deborah Britzman’s remarkable question, ‘What holds education back?’, appears more urgent than ever in a world of accelerating environmental crises, climate change, and what has been described as omnicide – the annihilation of everything. What, then, holds education back from initiating radical change under these urgent conditions? This paper introduces the notion of ‘institutional anxiety’ as a consolidating force and explores how it may condition possibilities for resistance. Bringing examples from ethnographic fieldwork and experiences of course development in conversation with psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic thought, a key catalyst of institutional anxiety is discussed: Anxiety related to ‘the question of the animal’ as a threat to human exceptionalism in educational practice and research. Confronting these anxieties could open new modes of being and acting in academic space and give interspecies ethics, justice and sustainability a chance to develop in omnicidal times.

KEYWORDS:

• Omnicide
• anthropocentrism
• human exceptionalism
• education for sustainable development
• animals
• anxiety

Introduction: omnicide and the problem of education

In their recent editorial for the journal Environmental Education Research, Constance Russell and Reingard Spannring (2019) note that ‘[i]t has become a cliché to begin an editorial for this journal with a rehearsal of the challenges facing the planet and all its inhabitants’ (1137). This keynote wrestles with a similar dilemma: How is it possible to invite a debate on the conference theme ‘Education, the Environment and Sustainability’ without resorting to repetitions, rehearsals, and clichés on the precarious state of the world? This is not a simple task, and in this paper, I don’t claim to avoid clichés; I will rather underscore the significance of their messages. But I will also discuss education’s position in the climate and environmental crisis by looking at the internal disposition of education, asking what holds education back (Britzman 2003) from becoming a transformative force for change. To this end, I will introduce the concept of institutional anxiety as one possible barrier against radical educational change. I will then explore how unspoken assumptions about human exceptionalism¹ (Haraway 2008), underpinning the anthropocentric infrastructure of educational institutions, become an anxiety-producing force whenever this exceptionalism is challenged, even in subtle and minor ways. I will further suggest that the momentary breakdowns in education caused by minor gestures of challenge and resistance (Manning 2016) hold a potential for being and acting differently in spaces of teaching and learning. In this discussion, I will draw on examples from my own empirical fieldwork.

But let me begin in another place: Danielle Celermajer’s (2020) opinion piece ‘Omnicide: Who is responsible for the gravest of all crimes?’, written in the aftermath of the devastating Australian bushfires spring 2020, when over a billion animals (invertebrates excluded) are estimated to have been killed (Wood 2020). Escalating climate crisis caused by global warming, species extinction at alarming rates, ocean pollution, threats of ecosystem collapse and pandemic outbreaks originating in destructive human-animal relations, are crises that cannot fully be understood in terms of genocide or ecocide. Rather, omnicide – the annihilation of everything – may be the appropriate term for what is going on (Celermajer 2020). None of us, writes Celermajer, ‘developed a specific intent to kill everything. But all of us have created and are creating the conditions in which omnicide is inevitable.’ Who then, among all the human ‘we’ on this planet, have contributed most to these omnicidal conditions, is a question that has been discussed for years in the Anthropocene vs. Capitalocene debate (Chakrabarty 2009; Malm and Hornborg 2014), but among all the arguments that I may be guilty of rehearsing in this keynote, this is not one of them.

Instead, I want to turn to education. What is the responsibility of, and what can education achieve in omnicidal times? If I were a visiting alien trying to learn something from the complex institutional infrastructures on Earth, I would contend that education seems to be uniquely placed to contribute to the work of preventing terrestrial omnicide and direct the world’s human and nonhuman inhabitants toward a less gloomy future. Research-based suggestions of how to begin this educational work are already available. A key issue in this work is how we relate to nonhuman animals. The open access ‘Sydney Declaration on Interspecies Sustainability’ (Probyn-Rapsey et al. 2016) argues for an expanded definition of sustainability to include interspecies ethics acknowledging that also animals have a right to the social, material and ecological bases for flourishing lives, sustained over time. The Sydney Declaration critiques anthropocentric notions of sustainability that

... stigmatize[s] animals as yet one more problematic source of GHG emissions, like cars or cement factories, rather than recognizing them as subjects who, like us, must cope with the devastating impacts of climate change. Non-human animals aren’t the cause of GHG emissions; human exploitation of them is. (Probyn-Rapsey et al. 2016, 137; emphasis in original)

The Sydney Declaration presents the following five calls to action to guide university policies for sustainable campuses:

1. A university defines carbon footprint to include the contribution made by animal agriculture

2. A university defines environmental sustainability to include considerations of food practices

3. A university commits to producing knowledge to educate students and the broader community on the key contributors to climate change and areas for action (energy, transport, animal agriculture)

4. A university ensures that its social justice commitments include interspecies ethics

5. A university promotes plant-based diets (understood here as food free of animal products) to optimize staff and student health and wellbeing and supports individual choice and transition via institutional structures, campaigns and incentives (Probyn-Rapsey et al. 2016, 138).

Despite a few notable examples of UK and US-based universities that have taken policy initiatives in this direction (Probyn-Rapsey et al. 2016), institutional resistance to such initiatives remains profound. As research in critical animal studies has elucidated, the infrastructure of (at least Western) formal education rests on anthropocentric, or, to borrow Donna Haraway’s (2008) term, human exceptionalist grounds, designed to privilege human interests while marginalizing or exploiting other animals and species through, for instance, science based on knowledge produced by animal use (e.g., Best 2009; Cole and Stewart 2014; Corman and Vandrovcová 2014; Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen 2016; Kahn 2003; Kahn and Humes 2009; MacCormack 2013; Nocella II et al. 2019; Oakley 2019; Wallin 2014). Coupled with the embeddedness of education in the animal-industrial complex (Pedersen 2019a) and in larger sociopolitical developments driven by market economies and neoliberal agendas, most educational institutions are probably quite far from implementing interspecies sustainability policies. The issue of food appears as particularly controversial and resistant to policy regulations. My university, University of Gothenburg, frequently claims to be at the forefront of sustainable development work. In Autumn 2018, a university employee initiated a debate in the university’s internal newspaper, arguing for the implementation of a cross-faculty vegetarian food policy as part of the university’s sustainability commitments (Gren 2018). The call was firmly rejected by the Vice-Chancellor, on the grounds that ‘another policy’ is not needed, and that it is the responsibility of deans, department heads, and individual working groups to take sustainable decisions (Wiberg 2018).

Institutional anxiety

The question I will pursue here is Deborah Britzman’s (2003): What holds education back? ‘The Sydney Declaration on Interspecies Sustainability’ (Probyn-Rapsey et al. 2016) outlines a number of possible factors impeding cultural and institutional change around interspecies sustainability (especially animal consumption), including affective barriers to plant-based transition. My presentation will contribute to this discussion but from a slightly different angle, exploring institutional anxiety as an attempt to conceptualize what could be at stake. An assumption is that despite educational institutions’ strong commitment to science and scientific evidence, responses to initiatives against animal-oppressive practices and conventions in education, even if motivated by sustainability concerns, are not necessarily based on rational considerations and decisions. Something else may be at work here.

I will turn to a Deleuze studies scholar, Andrew Culp, and Deborah Britzman’s work in psychoanalysis and education, to begin to approach Britzman’s question of what holds education back. Viewed through Culp’s Deleuzian analysis (Culp and Dekeyser 2018), education is an apparatus of capture – a set of techniques associated with state power. Education holds itself back from igniting revolutionary instincts because it works in the area of chaos prevention and normalization of the present. (Ironically, chaos and disintegration of normality is likely to be part of a future of ecosystem collapse that could await us with or without educational consolidations of the status quo). The multiple stakeholder and market-driven requirements on education are part of a new landscape of control society (Deleuze 1992), accompanied by unspoken and subtle anxieties of the ever-present risk of not living up to the expectations haunting educational institutions and practitioners from every corner of society. In schizoanalytic terms (Buchanan 2013), education works in tandem with a set of socio-political machines, requiring education to conform, perform, and deliver certain pre-defined outcomes (cf. Ball 2003; Moran and Kendall 2009).

Turning to Deborah Britzman’s (2003) psychoanalytic exploration of education, the question of what (anxieties) hold education back is not primarily embedded in a socio-political control regime, but rather within education itself, or, more specifically, in the difficulty of separating education from its fictions and its ‘outside’. As Britzman notes;

We find discussions of education and its nervous conditions in the most unusual places: in a spate of contemporary novels, where the university is the stage for betrayal and misunderstandings; in popular films, where heroic teachers, aliens, and teenagers vie for glory; in comic sketches that exaggerate the absurdity of school rituals; and, most intimately, in our dreams. (Britzman 2003, 6)

To these representations of education in popular culture as accommodating anxieties of all sorts, could be added affective investments in debates on what counts as education and miseducation; resistance to new knowledge; teaching as an ‘impossible profession’ guaranteed to produce unsatisfactory results; as well as those familiar tendencies of anxiety emerging from school experiences recognizable by all who are, or have been, school children: ‘school phobias, running away, not being able to read, early stuttering, school pranks, and even cases of uncontrollable laughter.’ (Britzman 2003, 16).

It is here somewhere, in the rather heterogenous nervous system of education, in a fuzzy zone between reality and phantasy, between uncertainty and authority, beyond deliberate planning and predictable outcomes, that anxiety intensifies, proliferates, and picks up speed. I suggest that institutional anxiety can be captured through this intersection of schizo- and psychoanalysis, and that it works as a defense against, and denial of the series of continuous breakdowns that may be momentary, but together constitute a ‘permanent crisis’ of education (Buchanan 2013). As we shall see, these breakdowns are sometimes produced by education’s sociopolitical ‘outside’; sometimes fuelled by education itself.

Human exceptionalism must be defended² (I): institutional anxiety in educational practice

A particular instantiation of institutional anxiety is evoked by threats to the anthropocentric infrastructure of education. Addressing a familiar setting of non-formal education – zoos and aquariums – Jason Hribal (2010) gives an account of historical cases when captive animals have violently resisted their confinement in establishments of the ‘edutainment’ industry of zoos, aquariums, and theme parks, often by killing their trainers. ‘There is a long history to this struggle’, remarks Hribal. ‘Zoos and circuses live in fear of it and the historical changes that it can bring’ (Hribal 2010, 152). The fear that Hribal speaks about is indeed an institutional fear, as ‘incidents’ of captive animals killing zoo staff (for whatever reason) is potentially disastrous to the reputation of any zoo establishment once the story hits the media, and it usually sets off a whole apparatus of crisis management and public communication strategies.

The institutional anxiety of interest in this paper is, however, of a less spectacular and more imperceptible kind. Rather than a straightforward narrative of ‘nature strikes back’ revenge, the anxiety in the schools and universities I have encountered is rather related to what Cary Wolfe (2003) has called ‘the question of the animal’. As Jennifer Howard (2009) puts it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘/ … /[animal studies] scholars want to break down the categories and distinctions that have defined how we think about our relationship to everything that is not us. Some of them see it as nothing less than a revolution in how to think and how to live’. And, we could add, ‘how to educate’. Thus, the effects from opening education to ‘the question of the animal’ may have a revolutionary potential not unlike the revolutionary potential of Hribal’s (2010) violently resisting animals in zoos, because it disturbs prevailing anthropocentric mindsets and conventions in educational practice and theory. During my fieldwork in an upper secondary school with an animal caretaker programme, I interviewed an assistant principal, asking whether he thought that talented applicants to the school might be turned off by the information on the school’s website, saying that students are expected to use animals for research purposes. He admitted that he could see a risk that some idealist-minded student would apply to the programme in order to engage in releasing (farmed) minks in the future. ‘But then’, he added, ‘they surely get disappointed’, because ‘that is not what this programme is about’ (nervous laughter), ‘I mean it’s not that we try to preach that we should engage in fur farming, it’s not that, but …’ (Pedersen 2019a, 135). Surely there is a hint of anxiety in this school leader’s response to the risk of attracting nonconforming animal activist students to the school and what this could eventually lead to.

In another interview, this time with an animal rights activist, she told me about her experiences from upper secondary school. While her activist engagement with the school’s local Amnesty group passed by unnoticed, the principal reacted strongly to her displaying posters and T-shirts on the school premises with vegetarian and vegan messages – ‘Choose life, choose vegetarian’ – viewing it as an ostensible offence to other students. The principal asked her to take off her T-shirt and refrain from wearing it, but the student refused (Pedersen 2019a). This could be understood as another example of institutional anxiety – a fear of what parents and students may say if the school’s unarticulated meat norm (Gålmark 2005) – a part of its anthropocentric infrastructure – is disturbed. Non-conforming, it seems, is a constant source of anxiety to educational institutions’ investments in chaos prevention and normalization of the present (Culp and Dekeyser 2018), whether the non-conforming act consists of harmless school pranks and sudden outbursts of uncontrollable laughter (Britzman 2003), or politically driven expressions of animal rights messages in schools.

When school students initiate acts of resistance, although they clearly perform as norm-breakers, they also adhere to a rather conventional protocol around the power/resistance nexus in education, assuming that revolutions are primarily the arena of young people striving for influence over their daily lives as well as over social orders on a global scale. Youth resistance usually sets off an apparatus of control measures orchestrated from ‘above’, that is, from the authority collective of school leaders, teachers and principals. But what happens when change is driven by adult ‘insiders’; for instance, when university teachers confront their own colleagues with requests for deconstruction of the anthropocentric infrastructure of their workplace? A few years ago I initiated a pedagogical development project in my department, with the purpose to introduce critical animal pedagogies as part of sustainable development in education. The project, involving critical analyses of animal exploitation by challenging educational anthropocentrism and speciesism, gained support from the department leadership and a small working group was formed (Pedersen, Håkansson, and Wals 2019). When it was time to implement the new course module however, there was fierce disapproval from our teacher colleagues. When they realised that we had included undercover footage from a pig production site and slaughterhouse as a learning resource in the module, all hell broke loose. One science teacher colleague even conducted a minor research investigation around the film, produced by an animal rights NGO, and presented evidence he found on the web indicating that parts of the film were not 100% authentic but actually manipulated in certain ways. This resulted in a series of breakdowns: the controversial video was taken out of the course module, and even led to a suggestion, supported by the Director of graduate studies, to take out the entire critical animal pedagogies module altogether.

When attempting to understand the twist and turns around this conflict, a colleague who was part of the working group concluded that our initial pedagogical idea of ‘becoming uncomfortable’ together with our students by asking them to critically question established norms of human–animal relations in society and education, became curiously enacted in the development of the module itself (Pedersen, Håkansson, and Wals 2019). Surely the discomfort surfacing during this process can also be understood as institutional anxiety: Anxiety evoked through affective investments in the debate on what counts as education and miseducation (‘the pig slaughter video is biased’; ‘critical animal pedagogies is a mission rather than education’; ‘education needs to be objective and show both sides of an argument’, cf. Flynn 2003); anxiety that such a marginal topic as human-animal relations would occupy a curricular space that could be used for more important matters; and anxiety emerging from the difficulty of separating education from its ‘outside’ (an animal rights NGO) (cf. Britzman 2003). I argue that institutional anxiety, in this case, gained particular force for two major reasons: First, because our course module was a bold challenge to the human exceptionalism underpinning the anthropocentric infrastructure of our teacher education department; and second, because the initiative was driven by teacher colleagues and staff – ‘insiders’ – rather than by students. The difficulty of separating education’s ‘outside’ from its ‘inside’ in Deborah Britzman’s (2003) psychoanalytic account is accentuated because there is no distinct boundary between them in the first place; rather, with Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 2004), the interior and the exterior are co-constitutive, constantly folding in on each other, existing trough their exchanges. Thus, axiomatic human exceptionalism is an intrinsic part of education, but so is its countermovements and resistance.

Non-conformity and its associated ever-present risk of credibility loss in the eyes of stakeholders, but also fragility of the unconscious internal bonds that keep us together in education, seem to be what holds education back. If we leave educational practice for a moment and turn our attention to educational research, we will find similar tendencies at work.

Human exceptionalism must be defended (II): institutional anxiety in educational research

In his review essay, ‘Listen, Ecological Marxist! (Yes, I Said Animals!)’, John Sanbonmatsu (2005) critiques the anthropocentric foundations of Marxism, claiming that Karl Marx, like most other Socialists of his time, never questioned human domination of other animals. Marx, writes Sanbonmatsu, ‘tried hard to distance his erstwhile scientific theories from all “bourgeois” claims of sentiment, including moral concern for animal welfare (which he viewed with undisguised contempt)’ (113). Sanbonmatsu recommends contemporary Socialists still inclined to see animal rights as a fringe issue to take a lesson or two from analytic moral philosophers, such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Embedded in Sanbonmatsu’s critique is not only an explicit request for a less anthropocentric critical theory, but also an implicit hint at an anxiety for ‘the question of the animal’ (Wolfe 2003) in leftist scholarship.

With some notable exceptions (Oakley 2019; Russell and Spannring 2019; Spannring 2017), reading current contributions to the research debate in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) provokes a paraphrasing of Sanbonmatsu: ‘Listen, Sustainable Development Educators! (Yes, I Said Animals!)’, as unquestioned anthropocentrism appears as the baseline of the bulk of ESD research. However, this has not always been the case. Helen Kopnina (2012) describes a radical change of focus that took place with the shift from Environmental Education (EE) to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). While earlier forms of EE were concerned with issues of environmental ethics, ecological justice and relations between humans, nature, and other species, Kopnina notes that with the turn to ESD, environmental protection was downplayed and social issues, ‘which may or may not be related to environment’ (701), prioritised. In ESD discourse, human rights are elevated, whereas the rights of other species are rarely addressed, and nonhuman animals are forced into generic categories as ecosystem representatives, biodiversity problems, and natural resources, their value defined instrumentally in relation to the extent to which they promote (or not) human well-being. The ‘social sustainability’ tendency in ESD has, it seems, driven interspecies relations to the margins, affirming an anthropocentric bias at a point in time when large-scale animal exploitation has been identified as a catalyst of innumerable environmental problems and a serious threat to the life-supporting ecosystems on which we all depend.

While Kopnina appeals to the empathy of individual ESD scholars to rethink the anthropocentric bias in ESD, I suggest that a re-definition of ‘the social’ in social sustainability to include human-animal relations is necessary, which would put ESD in closer conversation with developments in sociology (cf. Arluke and Sanders 1996) and sustainability studies (cf. Hiedanpää, Jokinen, and Jokinen 2012; Pöllänen and Osika 2018).

Institutional anxiety regarding the question of the animal in education research does not always take form as blatant marginalisation, disregard, or resistance. It may also, somewhat paradoxically, emerge as ‘enlightened distance’ to anthropocentrism (Pedersen 2019b). Rather than anxiety of the question of the animal, in this recent scholarship, we find efforts to bring human-animal relations in as integrated dimensions of ESD research which, at first sight, makes a promising move toward the inclusion of nonhuman animals in notions of the ‘social’ in social sustainability. A closer reading of these publications, however, reveals an animals-for-us position (Pedersen 2019b; cf. Wallin 2014) in solidarity with human-centered liberal pluralism masquerading as critique (Lindgren and Öhman 2019) or even in solidarity with the animal industry itself (Bruckner and Kowasch 2019), rather than solidarity with the marginalised group these authors claim to integrate (i.e., the animals). Purporting not only an ‘enlightened distance’ to anthropocentrism, but also a distance to what the authors perceive as ‘moralizing’ about the situation of animals in society, I suggest some element of institutional anxiety could be at work in these articles. This is an anxiety haunting scholars, myself included, who are openly advocating for nonhuman animals. It is associated with a risk of credibility loss, accompanied by the ever-present threat that one’s status and career prospects (including possibilities for research funding and promotion) in academia may be jeopardized, due to one’s solidarity with animals and animal rights social movements. Omnicidal times or not; human exceptionalism must be defended, and again, anxiety is at work in the folding in of uncomfortable exteriority (animal liberation advocacy) in the anthropocentric infrastructure of academia. The question then becomes, under what conditions can anxiety be a productive force that not only holds education back, but actually pushes education forward (Britzman and Dippo 2000)?

Educational resistance and change in omnicidal times

Erin Manning (2016) argues that the ‘minor gesture’, in contrast to grand manifestations or organised revolutions, is a force creating conditions for system-shifting changes. A student refusing to take off her T-shirt with an animal activist message in school, and a small teacher team developing a course module unsettling anthropocentric conventions in the teacher education department, can both be viewed as ‘minor gestures’ of resistance to the anthropocentric infrastructure of education. Both open possibilities for being and acting differently in education. Both are also acts of desire, permeated by passionate engagement, a stubborn belief that change is still possible and that education somehow can become a venue for enacting a different world. Desire, in Deleuze and Guattari, is a life-force; it can be put to work against omnicidal tendencies, and when condensed to a four-word T-shirt print worn by a secondary school student (‘Choose life, choose vegetarian!’), this minor gesture becomes a desiring-machine (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009):

Desire is revolutionary by nature because it builds desiring-machines which, when they are inserted into the social field, are capable of derailing something, displacing the social fabric. (Deleuze 2004, 233)

Although T-shirt wearing and course module development as minor gestures of resistance in education may, as we have seen, stir up a great deal of conflict, they are in themselves no guarantee for change; their effects may indeed not change anything at all. What they do is that they point to the possible; the potential of education to exceed predefined positions presented to students (Pedersen 2019a), or, in Manning’s (2016) words, ‘what else life could be’ (8). It would indeed be hopeful if these acts of resistance could release a multiplicity of desiring-machines within education, capable of (speaking with Deleuze) ‘derailing’ its anthropocentric infrastructure. However, Andrew Culp warns us (drawing on The Invisible Committee) that change is unlikely to be achieved from within education, as the insider position suffers from a ‘curse of symmetry’ occurring when we constitute ourselves on the same plane as the institution we seek to change. Rather, we need escape routes, carving out spaces for partisan knowledge aimed at coalition-building (Culp and Dekeyser 2018), refusing the normalizing language of an education seeking to colonize our future with models of the present.

Although I believe we have to be attentive to the ‘curse of symmetry’, and fully endorse the necessity to carve out escape routes and tactics of coalition-building with groups outside academia (such as animal advocacy and environmental movements), it would be a mistake to contend that working for change within education is futile. This is not a naïve over-reliance on what Peim and Stock (2021) have called the belief in the ‘mythical powers’ of education to bring about change. As educators, we must never forget the importance of inspiring, supporting, and collaborating with a new generation of students. As educators, we are not only engaged in ‘teaching’, but also in modeling different ways of being as an academic; different ways of being and acting and occupying the academic space. What we do (or refrain from doing) in this space, matters. Therefore, we should not let institutional anxieties hold education back, and we should not let institutional anxieties become our own (as we do when we make reassurances that our radical initiatives are negotiable, harmless, and nothing really to be anxious about). Rather, let us de-territorialize our teacher positions by openly acknowledging and confronting anxiety around human exceptionalism in education. If veganism, for instance, turns out to be an anxiety-producing topic in education, let us push it one step further beyond our comfort zones and explore scenarios of human withdrawal from violent intervention with the world; an absolute cessation of colonization, exploitation and omnicide (MacCormack 2013, 2020). Such a de-territorialization in education may offer impetus for action as well as mental preparation for a future that may be ours regardless of what happens (or not) in education. It may make present human exceptionalist-education increasingly unintelligible and intolerable – just like the world at large under omnicidal conditions.

Conclusion

It may appear that there are plenty of incentives for education to change. The threat of a disintegrating human civilization on a largely inhabitable earth is one of them, and could sooner or later make education in its present manifestations alienated even to itself (Wallin 2016). This existential dilemma (or drama) for education has been concisely summarized by Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement: What is the point of educating for a future that may not exist? What makes Thunberg’s straightforward question so startling is that under current planetary conditions, when collapsing ecosystems may become unable to support life as we know it, the very questions we ask about education must themselves change.

This paper has taken on board Deborah Britzman’s (2003) question: What holds education back? I have explored the concept of institutional anxiety as both a blockage holding education back, as well as a potential force for change that may push education forward, especially regarding the anthropocentric infrastructure of education that is becoming increasingly obsolete in omnicidal times. The cases brought up from my fieldwork, however anecdotal and disparate, may serve as illustrating examples of how even minor disturbances to human exceptionalist assumptions may trigger quite strong reactions in education. Further research could explore more in-depth how education emerges in response to a multiplicity of anxiety-producing forces; however, the provisional analyses in this paper simply suggest that anxiety appears to be embedded as one dimension of the complexity of these responses. To put it differently, I do not claim institutional anxiety to be an explanation model, nor that this is the way we should look at education in order to understand and transform it. Rather, I see this concept as opening new modes of thought and spaces of action in education, as well as a tool to explore together with our students. Institutional anxiety may work as a consolidating force, but as a tool for analysis and impetus for action, it also troubles the assumption that education is immutable to change, and may create new conditions for being and acting in academia in omnicidal times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, Donna J. Haraway (2008, 11–12) defines human exceptionalism as a Western fantasy by which the self-centered human subject tries to hold panic at bay; a panic connected to three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the human subject: The Copernican wound, the Darwinian wound, and the Freudian wound; all three of which removed ‘Man’ from his superior position as the centre of the universe and above all other animals. Haraway describes these historical wounds as ‘decentering cuts’ inflicted by science.

2. The subheading paraphrases Michel Foucault ([1997] 2003)‘Society Must Be Defended’. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador.