An Ethics of Refusal: The Insistence of Possibles as a Speculative Pragmatic Challenge to Systemic Racism in Education

Abstract

AbstractTo address an ethics of refusal in higher education is to wager in the name of future possibles not already governed by the extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing. In this essay, Petra Mikulan shows American pragmatism to have always been, in a certain sense, post‐Anthropocene in its condition of emergence, bound up with settler colonialism and its extractive geopolitics. However, pragmatism in its speculative trust can also help engage education in thinking of a future that does not belong to a presupposed humanity and its “nature” by dramatizing a certain insistence of educational institutions on maintaining comfort and trust in the “common good.” What is at stake in education facing planetary ecological devastation and intensified racial and social injustices, Mikulan contends, is an ethics of refusal of institutionalized learning, knowing, and doing tout court, particularly if these educational regimes continue to insist on governing what are deemed the only possible (and thus impossible) enactments of education.