Educational Potentialities: Collected Talks on Revolutionary Education, Aesthetics, and Organization

For over two decades, philosopher Tyson E. Lewis has produced an impressive and sprawling body of work organized around the pursuit of alternative forms of educational life. By doing so, he's staged radical interventions in fields such as educational philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, and cultural studies, inventing new theoretical vocabularies and pedagogical practices to disrupt and suspend systems of oppression and exploitation. Reading and rewriting authors from diverse political orientations in surprising and unique ways, Lewis charts constellations of educational concepts and protocols that move beyond the dominant organization of our lives and our world. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten wrote once, "Lewis prepares us to improvise by showing us how [...] we already do just that." In this first collection of his previously unpublished lectures, Educational Potentialities provides an opening for all of us-as organizers and educators, theorists and artists-to access and engage the revolutionary potentialities present in every moment.
"Educational Potentialities offers expansive alternatives to marketized, deterministic educational thought and practice. Lewis' talks invite critical educators to courageously delight in the possibilities of curiosity, unknowability, and distraction. As Derek Ford's brilliant introduction reminds us, we need more than critique to transform learning spaces; Educational Potentialities presents teachers and theorists with ways we can move towards risky, joyful, and open educational encounters."
- Khuram Hussain, Associate Professor of Education, Middlebury College
"Lewis' talks offer an alternative view of education as a site of revolutionary potential. Refusing the economic and productive functions of educational practice under capitalism, he instead envisions education as a set of critically imaginative activities capable of challenging racism, sexism, and classism. Lewis is a generous guide through discourses of educational philosophy, drawing on examples that organizers, cultural workers, popular educators-or anyone frustrated with the limits of humanist and capitalist models-will find helpful."
- Sarah Louise Cowan, Assistant Professor of Art History, DePauw University