bildungsLab*

Counter-Drafts from the Teaching Machine

Critical knowledge production on education and culture

Desire, Difference, Resistance: Perspectives in Times of Constriction

The current social moment is marked by movements of closure and authoritarian temptations in which populist simplifications become hegemonic and threaten the very core to which the bildungsLab has been committed since its founding: openness, diversity, and a utopian desire for transformation.

This raises the question of how to imagine educational spaces that can counteract these constrictions. For closure targets not only difference but also the desire for change. It recognizes change as legitimate only where it aims at exclusion, control, and homogenization.

This is precisely why intersectionality becomes an indispensable practice. Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins remind us that power does not operate one-dimensionally but in interlocking ways. Intersectionality points to the necessary complexity of social life — a complexity that populist and nationalist discourses deliberately sever.

It reminds us that there are no simple answers and that the hierarchies of listening do not follow stable, predetermined lines. Intersectionality is indeed an analytical tool, but in this political moment it simultaneously enables us to develop an ethics against authoritarian, simplifying, and dehumanizing closure. It calls on us to cultivate forms of compassion in adversity and resistance, forms that understand difference as a vehicle for productive irritation and that counter its authoritarian demonization.

Yet when political discourse becomes increasingly hardened, when "politics" in the institutional sense loses its transformative power, what is needed — in the sense of Jacques Rancière — is the possibility of the political: disruption, intervention, the emergence of the unforeseen that refuses to conform to an administered order.

Accordingly, the bildungsLab understands itself as a context for the emergence of such a possibility of what is (for now) still unforeseen. In a time in which utopian visions are delegitimized and complex lived realities are not merely depoliticized but negatively politicized, instrumentalized, and excluded from hegemonic visibility, the Lab seeks forms that can operate outside these closures. Thus we search for practices that rearrange desire, that are resistant without exhausting themselves in boundary-drawing and critique, and that take migrant and of-color positionalities seriously as epistemic resources.