Pedagogies of Defiance

Abstract

Beginning from Paulo Freire's insistence that ‘Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom,' we can begin to unpack the political function of Higher Education in the UK. This essay uses auto-ethnographic fragments alongside examples of marketisation and securitisation in universities, in order to consider the dissonance between the university's role in authoritarian nationalism and its embrace of the language of ‘decolonisation.' Turning to the educational power of protest as a means to develop institutional disloyalty, this essay suggests that we can draw on the lessons of anticolonial and migrant struggles to construct a pedagogy of defiance beyond the university’s limits.