Dark Pedagogy Between Denial and Insanity

Abstract

This chapter argues for the potentiality of the Lovecraftian Denial-Insanity-Death spectrum and insists that a special pedagogical potential is found in the twilight zone between denial and insanity when targeting issues such as environmental, sustainability and climate change issues. Pedagogy (and pedagogy in learning and education) should aim higher than the classic linear notion of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences and ensuring emancipation through enlightenment. A dark pedagogy should address the issues and concepts that escape efforts to fully understand them and drag them into an illuminated position. The point is to emphasize that pedagogical approaches dealing with wicked problems such as climate change, environmental and sustainability issues needs to move in the twilight zone between denial-insanity-death, or push for a collapse of these distinctions in order to develop our understandings and our possibilities for dealing with the challenges that seemingly moves closer day to day. By levering different positions within speculative realism on the potentiality of a denial-insanity overlap this chapter pushes for non-cynical pedagogy that both accepts the fallibilities of human beings and the need to address what is not only human, and often way beyond our comfort zone.