Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

As universities confront compounding pressures, from institutional austerity and generative AI to widening social inequalities and eroded public trust, calls to “innovate” have become near-constant. Departments rebrand curricula to follow trends, pedagogical agendas pivot to absorb the next crisis, and faculty are urged to chase relevance in the name of student recruitment or institutional visibility. Yet in this churn, the labor of care, continuity, and deep engagement is often displaced. This paper explores a pedagogy of maintenance: a practice grounded not in novelty or acceleration, but in the attentive work of sustaining relational, intellectual, and ethical life within conditions of contradiction, fragility, and unresolved tension. Rooted in my experiences teaching courses on migration, law, and social justice in multiple institutions, this approach foregrounds resisting the curricular opportunism that treats global crises as pedagogical content to be mined, rebranded, or rapidly absorbed. Instead, it emphasizes care, continuity, and ethical improvisation. It foregrounds engaging students in public-facing projects, such as courtroom ethnographies, collaborative op-ed writing, and critical engagement with AI, not to master complexity, but to dwell within it. These practices invite students to grapple with the limits of expertise, the slowness of institutional progress, and the affective toll of navigating structural precarity, without seeking premature coherence. Positioning the classroom as a socially and ethically designed space, an infrastructure of relation rather than a conduit for achievement, this paper reframes pedagogy as maintenance work: iterative, relational, and often invisible. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, participatory design, and feminist pedagogies, it foregrounds education as a form of collective care: a refusal of churn, and a commitment to staying with the messy, uneven conditions of learning and unlearning.