Teaching beyond dread

David Theo Goldberg (2021) suggests that dread is the underlying mood, vibration, and tone that organizes subjectivity and haunts collective life in the present. Unlike grief, which is a namable feeling of loss stemming from a discernable cause, dread is more akin to melancholy, an affective state of being that saturates and floats without being named. Dread is embodied and anticipatory. It is the felt destabilization of world, space, and time in late capitalism. It permeates, fluxes, flows, circulates, weights, constructs, destructs, fixes, loosens, and differentiates as it “envelops the world it has come to define” (p. 29). Dread is “reactive, ambivalent about acknowledging the dire future on the current trajectory” (p. 160). It is a shared intuition that “we are edging to the cliff of disaster, of irrecuperable loss, even extinction, at least of life as we know it” (p. 66).

This special issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies reflects on the meaning and persistence of teaching in a time of dread. It pursues a number of interrelated questions that need to be struggled over by educators, scholars, artists, and activists today: What does it mean to teach in a moment of societal deterioration, technological escalation, and radical uncertainty regarding the future? What does it mean to teach in a time of racial enmity, cynicism, irrationalism, and sexual paranoia, where educators are increasingly perceived as threats and enemies? What does it mean to teach as power, land, and wealth are captured and redistributed to the top of the class pyramid—investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, oligarchic billionaires—while a majority of lives and futures become increasingly precarious and insecure? What does it mean to teach when studies by the world’s leading scientists warn that we are close to an irreversible climate catastrophe? What does it mean to teach when superstorms, mega-draughts, wildfires, loss of biodiversity, and species extinction proliferate and therein expose growing asymmetries of responsibility and vulnerability across regions and communities?

Dread, of course, is not new. Nor is it fixed or immutable. Dread has a modern history in slave ships, native genocide, imperial wars, Auschwitz, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons. Dread’s historical resonances are felt in new forms of apartheid, occupation, automated warfare, and imperial violence across the planet today. Goldberg suggests that it is the blues that perhaps best captures the modern aesthetics of dread. For instance, the haunting dread channeled by Nina Simone’s Strange Fruit—“Blood on the leaves, blood on the roots”—finds resonance in recent expressions of racist violence and the reassertion of White nationalism and neofascism in the United States and across the world. Dread is felt acutely in the emotional and spiritual wreckage left in the wake of recent racially motivated mass killings by far-right extremists that have taken place in grocery stores, mosques, and synagogues from Buffalo to El Paso to Christchurch to Pittsburgh, all of which targeted immigrants, Muslims, Jews, or people of color. Dread manifests in routine everyday hostility, disrespect, misogyny, and racism; in routine assaults on LGTBQ + people and the fundamentalist monstering of sexual difference; the exploitation and murder of Indigenous women; and vicious attacks on school boards, teachers, healthcare workers, professors, journalists, scientists, and librarians.

Dread accompanies the death of the social as it collapses into markets and technics. It is reflected in the nihilism of securitization, militarization, and the private stockpiling of personal weapons arsenals. Goldberg writes that dread is “the gathering evaporation of the commons, the dissolution of the social, the severing of and turning away from the sometime social ties and bind” (p. 34). Dread is tied to a state of war against civil society, against history, against memory, against difference, against compassion, and against solidarity. Symptoms of this war are manifold and include efforts to undermine and control schools and universities by finance capital, dark money networks, Christian nationalists, and reactionary billionaires. Cynical anti–critical race theory (CRT) laws; crusades to eliminate diversity programs; the imposition of book bans and gag orders; and the relentless assault on the human sciences, on critical thinking, discomforting histories, and on academic freedom itself—all reflect a war on the very idea of teaching as a pursuit of truth, ideas, free inquiry, memory, pluralism, care, possibility, and reciprocity. Death threats against teachers, professors, school leaders, and university administrators have become common and reveal the dark and dreadful currents of past, present, and future barbarisms. Yet despite being saturated with dread, teaching persists, and this persistence is a powerful weapon against pervasive dread. Teachers in a true sense are those who seek meaning, disturb ignorance, and foster understanding, curiosity, and openness. It is precisely because of this power to foster novel forms of thought, being, and relating that teachers are imagined as a threat to fundamentalists.

In recent history, the 2008 financial crisis accelerated austerity and social disinvestment, radicalized inequality, and ushered in a more visibly predatory and extractive form of capitalism. Societal dread, as it has emerged out of the crises of capitalism and the pathologies of neoliberalism, has been intensified by vast changes in human experience, power, surveillance, culture, and knowledge in line with digitalization and technological acceleration. Within the optimizing drives of what Goldberg calls “tracking capitalism,” knowledge is reduced to data while cognitive processing is fractured by algorithmic manipulation of emotion and attention, particularly across Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Stable referents that guide meaning, temporality, work, education, and relationships have been unsettled. The radical uncertainties of algorithmic dread have fostered intense desires for stable ground enhancing the seductive desire for purity in identity, nation, race, and ethnicity.

Authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and neofascist dread have thrived in this context of uncertainty and technological acceleration represented by the rise of authoritarian movements and figures like Donald Trump. The COVID-19 pandemic also supercharged a thick atmosphere of paranoia, loneliness, addiction, and detached alienation. Authoritarian billionaires such as Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel, Betsy Devos, and Miriam Adelson have poured money into dread-inducing media projects, think tanks, and anti-democratic campaigns. This includes funding politicians like Trump and the bankrolling of neofascist activists like Christopher Rufo, who is credited with igniting the campaign against CRT and the recent war on teachers. Right-wing organizations like the Federalist Society have also worked tirelessly to elevate far-right justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who have struck down worker rights, reproductive rights of women, student debt relief, affirmative action, and rights to restrict guns.

Teachers and teaching are immersed in this dreadful climate of digitalized irrationality and neoliberal authoritarianism. Over the last three decades in the United States, teachers have increasingly been viewed either as an inefficiency that requires interventions to hold them accountable to markets (i.e., producing docile workers for the gig economy) and/or as a threat to the fundamentalist values of reactionaries and Christian nationalists. Unsurprisingly, job satisfaction among educators in K–12 schools is at a 50-year low. Wages have stagnated. Working conditions have deteriorated. Teacher burnout and shortages have exploded. Colleges of education are having difficulty recruiting people into the profession. In higher education, the neoliberal reorganization of universities has been reliant on contingent faculty, with the professoriate now largely consisting of part-time, precarious, low-paid instructors. Professors are now routinely attacked by right-wing organizations such as Campus Watch. Academic freedom and faculty governance have eroded. This climate of precarity and dread is dramatized acutely in the United States but is certainly not restricted to it. Moreover, the United States has long been an exporter of neoliberal ideas and has supported anti-democratic projects such as the murderous regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the disastrous shock therapy inflicted on the former Soviet bloc, and the structural adjustments and debt-peonage imposed across the Global South in the 1990s.

More recently, far-right extremism and conspiracies like QAnon have likewise been exported abroad by those like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Far-right groups and billionaires in the United States contributed to funding Canada’s anti-vaccine Freedom Convoy in 2022 as well as the QAnon-style anti-vaccine group Voices for Freedom in New Zealand. The U.S. far-right has also celebrated and borrowed from authoritarians in other contexts. Victor Orban, for instance, has become a hero to U.S. conservatives and White nationalists like Tucker Carlson, Rob Dreher, and Christopher Rufo. They celebrate his stands against immigration and LQBTQ + rights and his decade-long war against democratic education in Hungary. Orban has closed the Central European University and consolidated control over academia by stripping the Academy of Sciences of its autonomy. He has ruthlessly attacked professors, teachers, and democratic values. He has banned gender studies and has mounted a campaign to eliminate the teaching of science, such as climate science, that conflicts with far-right ideology. In Russia, the war in Ukraine has led to intensified authoritarian control over education, where Putin has introduced “Memory laws” to correct history and has made ultranationalist “patriotic history” compulsory starting with kids in the first grade. Under Putin, new amendments have also been made to the state education law to foster authoritarian identifications and ideological conformity within Russian society. Teachers in Russia and in occupied Ukraine are expected to show fidelity to Russian state curriculum or they can face harsh retaliation. In Gaza, all the schools and universities have simply been eliminated.

Yet even in the most restrictive contexts, such as in Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Hungary, Russia, Philippines, and beyond, teachers nonetheless find ways to resist and to teach, often at great personal risk. Importantly, while teachers generate knowledge, thinking, potentiality, creativity, relationality, and solidarity for democratic society through the classroom and beyond, ultranationalists, neofascists, and authoritarians produce nothing. They do not produce ideas. They embody what Spinoza called the sad passions and what Nietzsche referred to as ressentiment. They cling to pathetic visions of order, ethno-purity, and hierarchy. Their obsession with hypermasculinity, war, and the demonization of others are signs of their weakness and fear. Love is strong. Truth is strong. Authoritarians, fundamentalists, and fascists hate and abhor thinking, ideas, critical and free inquiry, heterogeneity, mixture, and hybridity, which are the foundation of democratic education and informed teaching. Instead, they exalt the nation and are obsessed by fear of contamination from internal and external enemies. They produce unhappiness, misery, and joylessness. In contrast, teachers create—with students—knowledge, community, and living interpretations of the world and visions of possible worlds.

Crucially, the articles in this special issue focus not only on the contours of dread but on the persistence of teaching. How does teaching endure despite dread? How does teaching persist and what is the role of teaching in a moment when the old world is dying and the new one (the one we need) has yet to be born? How does teaching remain vital against historical amnesia and the poisonous myth that real solidarity is either a pathology or a dangerous fantasy? How might teaching be retained and rethought as a creative force for imagination over fatalism, reciprocity over exploitation, thought over fundamentalism, belonging over atomization, love over nihilism, mutuality over narcissism, care over hatred, joy over despair, democracy over fascism, and hope over dread? How does teaching enact the future? What new stories of teaching might be told?

The articles touch on a wide range of themes. The first four explore the context of teaching in a time of dread. David Theo Goldberg and Alexander Means conduct a wide-ranging conversation. They discuss Goldberg’s inspiration for his book, and they touch on race as a distinctive carrier of dread in the neoliberal and post-digital era. Last, they touch on higher education as vital to countering the culture of dread. Eric Ferris and Christopher G. Robbins analyze recent right-wing campaigns and efforts to undermine public education in the United States. Drawing on Elias Canetti’s metaphor “crowd of the dead,” they examine the emergence of Christian charter schools and anti-CRT movements. They then consider the effects of this political activity in terms of how it destabilizes public institutions that should safeguard against the manufacturing of (civic) dread. Robin Truth Goodman narrates her involvement as a plaintiff in litigation against Florida House Bill 233 and exposes how the legislation serves to limit free speech, deauthorize professional expertise, and turn students into vigilantes. She discusses how teaching and intellectual inquiry are being struggled over in a dread-inducing context of state overreach and growing authoritarianism and how this threatens democratic culture. Jeffrey Di Leo brings these themes into dialogue with teaching in the university. He argues that for those who seek to hold onto true academic freedom today, the university has become a house of dread.

The next four articles each touch upon different valences of race and pedagogy. Henry A. Giroux engages fascism both as a language of White supremacy and as a politics of disconnection. He argues that opposition to fascism requires understanding the educational conditions that give rise to it. Moreover, countering fascism requires grounding a new politics in a pedagogy that works against intellectual and social disconnections from history, capitalism, culture, and solidarity. Ga Young Chung explores the challenge and promise of developing an antiracist and anticolonial curriculum and pedagogy with first-generation Korean American seniors in the Southern United States. She explores how, in a context of anti-Asian hate and violence, the group channeled their dread into hope and a passion to learn and critically assess history. Brianne Pitts, Dawnavyn James, and Gregory Simmons resuscitate educational engagement with Black histories in order to offer guidance for orienting ourselves beyond dread while centering, by returning to, Black humanity through classroom pedagogy. They do so while articulating a vision of Black histories as a coherent, rigorous, and creative mode of thought. Michalinos Zembylas, in synergy with Pitts, James, and Simmons, draws on the Black radical tradition to articulate a “fugitive pedagogy” that mobilizes the anticipatory mechanics of dread to subvert reactionary narratives. Zembylas envisions dread as a productive affect that, when used as a pedagogical drive, can enable contingent and transformative possibilities within and beyond education.

The next three articles touch upon critical pedagogy in relation to global crises of capitalism, technology, and ecology. Graham Slater examines the automation of education as it produces “algorithmic anxiety,” which constrains—even delimits—pedagogical ability to enact alternate futures. Slater wages open battle against the proliferation of dread as our “driving social sensibility” by utilizing our capacity for imagination within pedagogy to center a struggle for creating new sensibilities. Ken Saltman focuses on how the climate crisis, educational privatization, and new educational technologies are linked to a broader crisis of thought and agency. He argues that critical pedagogy, creative teaching, and the commons can serve as tools to fight against the dread of social and personal paralysis, cynicism, and despair. Noah De Lissovoy mediates on critical pedagogy as a means of contesting capitalist reason and how it shapes what can be said, thought, and known. By enacting poetic, unruly, experimental, and fugitive forms of thought, he explores the potentiality of the outside and the possibility of the “impossible” through joy and love, the very foundation for radical and liberatory teaching.

Finally, Yuko Ida and Tyson Lewis explore teaching, aesthetics, and radical imagination in a time of dread. For Ida, this means taking inspiration from poetry, dance, and singing to think of a world beyond dread in and through teaching. She explores possibilities to unsettle essentialized and fixed identities prevailing in authoritarian states by activating multiplicity and hybridity through playful experimentation. For Lewis, joyful moments and laughter in the classroom act as affective and pedagogical alternatives to dread. He critically interrogates hope as mutually constitutive of fear. Drawing from Spinoza and Freire, Lewis argues that laughter with sheer joy embodies collectivity, relationality, and potentiality wherein bodies join together as mutually affirmative and empowering relations in the present, right now, without delay.

As the articles in this special issue all contend from various angles, teaching has the potential to open up space and ideas for materializing and practicing what Goldberg calls the “ecology of care” (p. 210) and “imagining new worlds … living without segregations, social purifications, securitized homogenizations” (p. 213). The cultivation of an ecology of care intersects with reviving and reimagining forms of teaching grounded in interpretive, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sensibilities against the culture of dread. These are modes of teaching that refuse the deadening impulses of dread and strive for forms of thought capable of locating self, other, and world within the imbrications of history, nature, and social relations. Seeds of such cultures already exist, reflecting the labor of countless educators engaging in vital work in schools, universities, and communities. They are also found in a resurgence of union organizing; anti-poverty campaigns; ongoing protests against state violence, racism, and climate inaction; and Indigenous-led movements against the poisoning of land and water. Teaching is vital for worlds beyond the dread of cynicism, fatalism, spiritual paralysis, war, and systemic nihilism.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Alexander J. Means

Alexander J. Means is Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Yuko Ida

Yuko Ida is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Matthew Myers

Matthew Myers is a masters student in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.