Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

In Sub-Saharan Africa, co-production and participatory planning are increasingly common in pedagogy and policy, such as the revised National Housing Policy (NHP) adopted in Namibia in 2023; while digital self-enumeration is increasingly tested; in Kenya (Panek and Sobotova, 2015), South Africa (Berens, 2019) and Namibia (Ley et al, 2022; Busch, 2024). Rouvroy’s (2012, 2015, 2016, 2020) ‘algorithmic governmentality’ and Stiegler’s (1998) ‘proletarianization’ suggest this may unintentionally reinforce hegemony. For Stiegler (1998) technics is not only centred on “tools” but the externalisation of memory (noetics), and drawing on Simondon’s conception of ‘sense’, should instead be understood as part of ontogenetic modulation (Simondon, 2022; Combes, 2013); preserving urban dynamism, creativity and response-ability (Haraway, 2008; Barad, 2007) and producing in-formation, as the “difference that makes a difference” (Bateson, 1987). Here, I introduce two new dimensions, tested in an urban and landscape design studio. Firstly affect, central to processes of ‘individuation’. Drawing on Jane Rendell’s (2010) site writing, speculative practices such as ‘affective writing’ and filmmaking, foreground embodiment, immanence and more-than-human perspectives, as critique and modulate by “producing problems”. Secondly, operationalizing the intersection of Deleuze’s political philosophy of ‘Flow, Code and Stock’ (Smith, 2012) and Guattari’s (2000) Three Ecologies (mental, social, and environmental) as an analytical framework, consequent operations whether physical, juridical or financial, are mapping out to conceptualise entangled socio-technical assemblages, reciprocal relationality and situated knowledge. The purpose is to place the studio as a speculative socio-political spatial operation in dialogue with the philosophy of technics to make sense of new directions.