Non-Spaces in Educational Praxis

• In Event: Worlding Otherwise: (Non)Spatial Refusals and Affective (Im)Possibilities

Abstract

This presentation critiques how aporia, fugitivity, and deterritorialization often manifest as fleeting disruptions within education, ultimately reabsorbed into institutional logics of dialectical opposition, sensical-construction, and/or temporal closure. Building on Derrida, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for sustaining non-spaces: indeterminate, embodied, livable pedagogical practices that resist institutional capture without resolving into coherence. Central to this ethic is the cripped mindbody, which disrupts the epistemological and ontological assumptions of normative knowledge and being. Through conceptual analysis and embodied vignettes, I show how the cripped pedagogue enacts an ongoing aporia within the classroom/school. This work affirms pedagogy as livable, excessive, and otherwise.

Author

• Brad Bierdz, Georgia Southern University