Educational Hacking: The Politics of Appropriation for Common Use in Educational Practice and Research

• In Event: 58.083 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 58.083-8 - Curricular Hacking and Other Suspensions as a (re)Turn to the Commons

Abstract

Objectives: This paper will provide a brief theoretical framework for understanding the various interventions presented on this panel. Drawing on recent work in educational philosophy on the politics and practices of hacking (Lewis & Friedrich 2016), I will outline the essential logic of hacking and why it is important for reconceptualizing the politics of education. I will then conclude with an overview of the papers presented and how each embodies certain facets of what it means to “hack” into educational systems of accountability, surveillance, and research methods.

Theoretical Framework: A major theoretical influence on our understanding of hacking is Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) theory of conjunctions and connections. Whereas classical ontology focuses on being, Deleuze focuses on becoming through a series of combinatorials. Combinatorials are indefinite sets of relations that suspend the rules binding identities to certain places, times, uses, and expectations. Through combinatorial series, elements are set in motion, rhizomatically expanding outward through unexpected linkages with other elements. Instead of defining something in terms of fixed, hierarchically sedimented relationships, the combinatorial breaks through boundaries through an indefinite series of and…and…and. This produces complex variety, and opens up being to surprising possibilities of becoming. At its heart, any act of hacking is a political project that disrupts normative values of good sense defining what something is and how it ought to be used. It does so through unexpected combinatorials and connections that displace objects, appropriate practices for contraband use, and disrupt everyday expectations through inventive juxtapositions.

Modes of Inquiry: My mode of inquiry here is philosophical. I will provide a close reading of Deleuze on the combinatorial and then articulate (a) how this concept helps explain hacking and (b) how hacking is a useful concept for understanding certain creative interventions into educational practice and research as illustrated by the papers presented on this panel.

Scholarly Significance: By developing a philosophy of hacking, we can shed new light on an emerging set of educational interventions, thus helping translate “knowledge to practice” in innovative ways. My introduction will demonstrate how the papers presented all embody various dimensions of hacking. These include (a) how hacking is an act of creative disruption of good sense and common sense understandings of educational practice and research; (b) how hacking appropriates ideas, objects, and processes in order to creatively reconstruct them for common use; (c) how this gesture of appropriation is never sanctioned and cannot be socially validated or certified; (d) how hacking can be done by anyone, anywhere, at any time and thus is inherently linked to the equality of radical democracy.

Author

• Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas