Pedagogy: (Mis)performing the contemporary university

This chapter engages the transformational potential of pedagogical practice in the classroom and beyond as both performance and misperformance. It focuses on the ways in which institutional scripts, the disciplinary expectations of the academic field of international relations, and the logic of the market shape and condition bodily movement, modes of expression, and structures of thinking, feeling, sensing as well as practices of self-making in the contemporary university and, more broadly, as everyday social performance. Through vignettes that give a personal, narrative account of learning about learning, it tells the story of an experimental course at Central European University, which specifically sought to draw attention to and creatively subvert the enactment of habitual academic performances in various registers. Embracing the risk of mistakes, discomfort, and awkwardness as intrinsic features of the experience of teaching and being taught, routinized and instrumental practices of sense-making opened up to new perceptual dimensions. In this effort, misperformances as ephemeral, unpredictable, improvised moments that are inevitable in the performance of institutional roles revealed their generative capacity to facilitate embodied, grounded, and socially sensitive understandings of selfhood and otherness as lived, actual realities of international relations. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s figure of the ignorant schoolmaster, an iterated listening exercise foregrounded the work of attention and, as illustrated by focus group discussions, enabled participants to lessen performance pressure and develop alternative sensibilities of embodied presence, communication, and learning together.