This paper explores the role of counterfactual thought in educational theory by proposing a heuristic that distinguishes between two modes: ‘As if’ and ‘What if’. We begin by grounding the discussion in philosophical debates on language, imagination, and fictionality, before introducing the heuristic, which situates these modes within a broader typology of relations to reality. We then elaborate two exemplary figurations – axioms for ‘As if’ and Science Fiction for ‘What if’ – to demonstrate how counterfactual thinking operates in educational theory and as educational theory. A final discussion assesses the heuristic’s analytical, clarificatory, and generative value. We conclude that educational theory is inherently imaginative and that counterfactual modes of thought are essential to its capacity to critique the present and envision alternative futures.

What kind of worlds do people live in and how do these worlds impact on education’s capacity for responding to the climate emergency? As Bruno Latour (2017, 2018) puts it in his work, this is not an effect of simply seeing ‘the world’ from different, conflicting vantage points, rather it is that we indeed inhabit different worlds: for some the world is where land, resources, and animals are for human use and subject to human value; for others the world is a place of profound interconnection and spirit with other living beings and non-living entities. Beginning with a critique of how ‘the’ world has been utilised in education research, I then discuss ‘worlding’ as an educational practice which recognises that we just do not live in the world, or even with the world, but that we are of worlds, simultaneously constituting and being constituted by them.

Education research has been increasingly concerned about the role of instrumentalism in defining education. Within the context of the climate emergency, conceiving of education instrumentally positions educated subjects as actors capable of minimising the effects of climate change. This article is not critical of actions that mitigate the climate emergency. However, within the research that resists the instrumentalization of education, the climate emergency requires a status different from its role as an end that orients the content and practices of education. By asking what is educational about the climate emergency, this article focuses on the emergence rather than the urgency of climate change as a way for education to carry on as the climate emergency continues to present unforeseen challenges of living together. The article concludes with the irreducibility of conflict to an emergent understanding of the educational, a feature that commits education to an incomplete and porous world.

How and where can one find hope amid the blasted landscape of higher education? It has been 30 years since Bill Readings declared the university “in ruins” and things can scarcely be said to have improved since then. Some place their hope in trying to recover and rebuild “the public university”. This paper takes a different tack. Rather than considering higher education “in crisis” (from which recovery might be possible), the paper invites us to consider the post-apocalyptic academy (the end of a world). A post-apocalyptic lens has heuristic value because it frees the imagination from the constraints imposed by a romantic attachment to the past and provides a position from which to look at ourselves anew. Taking inspiration from Jonathan Lear’s study of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, and the “radical hope” that enabled Coups to lead his people through a process of cultural collapse, the paper explores what it might mean to adopt a stance of radical hope in the face of the collapse of purpose and meaning within the contemporary academy. Arguing for the importance of reading radical hope in conjunction with Fredric Jameson’s “anti-anti-utopianism”, the paper offers some thoughts on what an anti-anti-utopian radical hope might look like and call on us to do. These are illustrated through vignettes reflecting on articulations of hope to be found within a number of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Some may regard the hope emerging from this discussion a little “thin”. It may also, however, be the best hope we have.

This article brings Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy to critically examine the film’s pedagogical implications. At the surface, the film follows a young boy’s (Ahmad) apparently simple quest to return a classmate’s notebook. This quest turns into a journey that evolves into a quietly powerful confrontation with the structures of institutional authority. Drawing on Levinas’s notion of subjectivity as inherently grounded in responsibility for the Other, the film is interpreted as staging an ethical awakening that is not embraced freely, but placed upon the subject, disrupting the totalizing logic of obedience entrenched in familial and educational systems. We argue that Ahmad’s refusal to yield to these systems’ demands is not an act of childish obstinacy, but rather a subtle yet subversive challenge to the pedagogical machinery that not only denies individuality, but is essentially driven by homogeneity. By analyzing the dynamics between anxiety, responsibility and disobedience, this article argues that the film presents a poetic yet profound critique of education as a site of normalization, while simultaneously offering a model of ethical subjectivity constituted through substitution, and failure. The failure to “achieve” the aim – Ahmad never finds the friend’s house – is understood as the condition for a non-utilitarian ethics.

While school is oftentimes described in dystopic terms, it can also be envisioned as a utopia – a place of freedom and equality where social hierarchies are irrelevant and time is dedicated to studying the world rather than serving profit and utility. Even if most contemporary schools tend much more towards the dystopian, the utopian dimension persists as an ever-present irreducible aspect of the school. Understanding what is at stake in school education requires an examination of the meaning and implications of this duality. To do that, I draw on two political thinkers: Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Rancière. By highlighting the aesthetic dimensions of their views, I demonstrate how, for both, utopia and dystopia coexist simultaneously. Marcuse draws on romantic poet Friedrich Schiller to conceptualize aesthetic experience as the realization of a free, utopian life existing alongside a dystopian reality. However, while Schiller envisions aesthetic education as a pathway to achieving the political ideal, Marcuse contends that the aesthetic dimension lacks the capacity to transform actual dystopian conditions. Rancière, for his part, critiques utopias framed in the distant future as ultimately perpetuating existing inequalities. Instead, his “method of equality” suggests an alternative: one can experience equality and inequality, utopia and dystopia, simultaneously—exemplified by a worker having an aesthetic experience while laboring. By connecting aesthetic experience to the time of scholè , I argue that school similarly enables the coexistence of utopia and dystopia, and point to the possibility of tipping the balance towards utopia.

In this paper, I discuss debates related to the nature of scholarly practices such as reading in the digital age, and how these are underpinned by a range of utopian and dystopian visions of the future of the university. Rather than summarily dismissing these visions as positing ‘unattainable elsewheres’ or as paradoxical forms of nostalgic alarmism that deny the reality of the present, I instead take seriously some of the values that both sides of the debate seek to preserve. In line with certain strands of contemporary utopian scholarship, utopianism here does not relate to a static future state, but rather a form of thinking that is fruitful in helping us make sense of what we value as scholarly practices in the university. Here, however, I focus on the idea of dystopianism as a mode of thought which performs a similar affirmative function. In the case of digital dystopianism in particular, I argue that what is affirmed is a sense of scholarly reading as positing perpetual loose ends, something that is nevertheless still possible in the digital age provided we subscribe to a more pluralistic understanding of what it means to read.

Recently, there has been a greater emphasis, especially inspired by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the creation of educational policy that appears to want to control the future. This is evidenced by promoting an engineering fantasy in/for education that embodies positive universalism. We critically examine such positive universalism by drawing on the notion of negative universality (Kapoor & Zalloua, 2022ab) along with concepts of fantasy, desire and sublime objects (Žižek, 1989), and Rosa (2020) cultural criticism. We illustrate our concepts through the story of a skiing holiday where the fantasy of the perfect snowscape always fails to deliver what it promises. Here, travellers who desire the experience of skiing on ‘perfect snow’ are seduced by powerful advertising campaigns. Due to the unpredictability of nature, travellers are often faced with intrusive snow machines that noisily – and in a ‘vulgar’ way – engineer and manufacture the snowscape which spoils and punctures the fantasy of the perfect skiing conditions. Our paper critically examines the OECD’s (2019b) Learning Compass 2030 document, discussing the universal engineering fantasy that promises to produce certainty, moral improvement and control in/with education. We also analyse the accompanying OECD’s attitudes and values document (OECD, 2019a) that identifies a list of sublime objects such as respect, justice and Bildung to which all countries must aspire if they wish to succeed. We conclude that the policy documents of the OECD present a positive universal engineering fantasy that promises a non-antagonistic and harmonious future. However, such a future will be impossible to achieve. Hence, we call for educators to critically engage with negative universality to expose the lacks and contradictions always inherent in global policies. This would provide educators with an opportunity to reflect on and critically confront seductive policy and its engineering fantasy that captures their desires.

In this editorial, we argue for the urgent need for democratic methodologies in education research in a time of global upheaval, increasing populism, and authoritarianism. We outline how neoliberalism has narrowed pluralism, education, and in turn democracy, proposing that research that is relational and disruptive in nature can counter this trend, and develop democracy, whether in the micro, meso, or macro. Moreover, we believe that democratic methodologies are about ‘more than research’. They are necessarily political, offering research methods that can support the growing global call for new approaches to socioeconomic policymaking and practices that reject the promotion of narrow, individualistic capitalist concerns and are instead based on unifying collaborative, relational values that are, we argue, vital in an increasingly divided world. After establishing our case for democratic methodologies, we explore the articles that are contained in this Special Issue. Presenting innovative international research perspectives, the collection explores how research methodologies can actively further democratic principles. The articles represent an intersectional approach, addressing critical social issues including disability research, decolonization, LGBTQIA+ resistance, youth climate engagement, and educational participation. By highlighting diverse research experiences, this editorial demonstrates how research methodologies can serve as a powerful mechanism for furthering democracy, even amid a progressively divisive political landscape.