Education has always strived beyond the transmission of knowledge or the production of predictable outcomes. It carries with it a promise of collective imagination and the possibility of envisioning a shared future. Yet this promise has never been secure. Every period of social, political, or environmental upheaval once again exposes the vulnerability of educational institutions and the internal contradictions of their mission.
In The Beautiful Risk of Education, Gert Biesta argues that risk defines the very nature of education. Education cannot be planned, guaranteed, or reduced to the delivery of knowledge, because it always unfolds between people rather than between mechanisms. Every act of learning contains the possibility of misunderstanding, resistance, or refusal, and it is precisely this indeterminacy that gives education its value. Attempts to eliminate risk make learning manageable and predictable, but in doing so strip it of the possibility of becoming a living event – one in which a person encounters the Other and comes into being as a subject.
Risk is not limited to the relationship between teacher and student. Educational institutions themselves experience crises – external and internal, economic, political, ethical – and within these fluctuations the same vulnerability becomes visible as in pedagogical interaction.
As Mary Churchill and David Chard show in their monograph When Colleges Close: Leading in a Time of Crisis, drawing on the case of Wheelock College, the moment when risk ceases to generate meaningful encounters within the educational process does not arrive suddenly. Instead, it unfolds gradually through the accumulation of disappointments: declining student enrollment, the erosion of faculty trust in administration, and the diminishing viability of a historic mission – training teachers for children from low-income families – under conditions of market competition. Together, these processes lead to the slow erosion of the promise that once made the institution alive. At that point, leadership faces a painful choice: either deny the reality in which the college now exists and cling to independence to the very end (risking sudden collapse and total loss), or acknowledge that preserving the mission may require a radical transformation of the form through which that mission has been realized.
What happens when the space of encounter once offered by risk gives way to rupture? When ideals and forms of collective imagination are exhausted alongside institutions that are losing their breath in yet another crisis? And if education is inherently unstable – if it rests on risk and trust – what does it mean to “continue learning” today? What forms can a pedagogy take that recognizes the possibility of failure and, at the same time, lives within it? How can we speak about institutional hopes, utopias, and continuities without denying the painful experience of loss and disillusionment?
This panel researchers, educators, artists, and practitioners working with themes of risk, utopia, and vulnerability in education. We are interested in both historical and contemporary forms of learning that emerge in moments of institutional collapse, as well as in the new, fragile forms of connection that allow educational life to persist against all odds.