Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions: Reconceptualising Critical Pedagogies for More-than-Human Crisis Times

This strong collaboration-rooted essay experiments with a so-called irruptive methodology to weave together the authors’ (post-)pandemic critical pedagogical experiences and praxes from within the contemporary neoliberal higher educational landscape. These experiences and praxes are mixed with irruptive philosophical snippets, conceptual passages, and narratives, each informing one another while addressing the many challenges attached to theorising and teaching in these more-than-human crisis times. Building on the work of critical pedagogical, posthumanist, and new materialist thinkers, the necessity of analysing these neoliberal (post-)pandemic times of crisis in their more-than-human complexity is then explained. This is done by sketching out a philosophical genealogy of ‘irruption’, presented here as a methodology and in the form of ʼneoliberal (post-)pandemic irruptions’. By reconceptualising these irruptions as events that challenge our teaching praxes but also simultaneously have the potential to reorientate us, this essay provides the reader with a situated critical pedagogy fit for more-than-human crisis times.