Worlds Otherwise: The Aesthetic Life of Manifestos in Authoritarian Times

• In Event: Form as Praxis: Aesthetics, Affect, and Dialogue in Comparative & International Education

Proposal

In authoritarian times, when education is increasingly weaponized to reinforce conformity, nationalism, and fear, comparative and international education (CIE) must ask not only what knowledge it produces but how it produces knowledge, and for whom. The authoritarian logics of closure, hierarchy, speed, and mastery often echo through academic norms themselves: the acceleration of publishing cycles, the prestige of international mobility, the dominance of metrics. If knowledge production is to serve as resistance, it must experiment with alternative scholarly practices that refuse these logics. This presentation proposes manifesto-making as an aesthetic and speculative practice of resistance—a way of holding open the possibility of worlds otherwise.
The manifesto has always been more than a policy statement. From revolutionary movements to avant-garde art, it carries aesthetic force: urgency, provocation, imagination. Yet manifestos have also historically served authoritarian ends, issuing commands, silencing multiplicity, and dictating singular futures. Our work seeks to reclaim and repurpose the manifesto form for democratic, artistic, and speculative purposes. I
This presentation draws on a collaborative project, Read This Before the Collapse: A Speculative Reading of Manifestos for Universities That Failed to Decarbonize. In this work, we practice speculative hindsight: imagining ourselves as scholars writing from a post-collapse vantage point, encountering manifestos not as successful reforms but as archival fragments, deferred and unrealized. Our (an)archive includes the Manifesto for Decarbonizing Scholarship and Research(2023), the No-Fly Climate Science Manifesto (2019), the Slow Science Manifesto (2010), Emily Potter et al.’s Shadow Places Manifesto (2022), Barnett’s Ecological University Manifesto (2024), and the SWANA Climate Sirens Manifesto, among others. Read together, these texts form a contradictory, unfinished archive of attempts to resist extractivist, technocratic, and authoritarian logics of knowledge production.
Our reading is guided by two conceptual orientations. Fossil epistemology names the ways academic knowledge itself is carbon-coded: built on the infrastructures of fossil modernity and shaped by authoritarian epistemes of mastery and control. World-building, in contrast, treats manifestos as speculative blueprints for alternative epistemic infrastructures—fragile sketches of futures otherwise. Together, fossil epistemology and world-building allow us to read manifestos both critically and creatively, as diagnoses of failure and as invitations to imagine anew. To frame this work, we draw on the concept of the (an)archive. Unlike traditional archives, which stabilize documents into closed records, an (an)archive suspends them as unfinished, unruly, and open to return (ZIN, 2024). Reading manifestos in this light means treating them not as dead texts but as aesthetic compost: fragments that continue to breathe, provoke, and invite collective re-imagining.
Manifesto-making, then, is not only a genre but a scholarly art practice. It is aesthetic (fragmentary, affective, speculative) and democratic (collectively authored, open-ended). It resists authoritarian logics not by issuing counter-commands but by cultivating plurality, ambiguity, and imagination. In this presentation, we will share fragments from our manifesto project and reflect on manifesto-making as both scholarship and art—an aesthetic practice that composes worlds otherwise in times when authoritarianism seeks to foreclose them.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Victoria Desimoni, Arizona State University

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

• Nicole Oster, Arizona State University

• Sandra Nabulega, Arizona State University