To teach as if there were no future

Abstract

Drawing on diverse situated experiences, the twelve authors of this article suggest the potential in teaching as if there was no future. To speak of a performance pedagogy futurity is to speak of an impossibility – the coexistence and circulation of technique does not lead towards a shared future, as intercultural pedagogies might have it, but instead to the absence of futurity altogether. The question is not when a future will arrive, as institutional temporalities often suggest, but rather how we hold each other, across the planet, in a constantly shared present, by means of a pedagogic encounter committed to multidimensional processes of differencing.