Paranoid Pedagogies

Jennifer A. Sandlin is Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, USA.
Jason J. Wallin is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This edited book explores the under-analyzed significance and function of paranoia as a psychological habitus of the contemporary educational and social moment. The editors and contributors argue that the desire for epistemological truth beyond uncertainty characteristic of paranoia continues to profoundly shape the aesthetic texture and imaginaries of educational thought and practice. Attending to the psychoanalytic, post-psychoanalytic, and critical significance of paranoia as a mode of engaging with the world, this book further inquires into the ways in which paranoia functions to shape the social order and the material desire of subjects operating within it. Furthermore, the book aims to understand how the paranoiac imaginary endemic to contemporary educational thought manifests itself throughout the social field and what issues it makes manifest for teachers, teacher educators, and academics working toward social transformation.

Focuses exclusively on the significance of paranoia as a mode of aesthetic and social production

1. Out of Our Minds: A Haphazard Consideration of Paranoia and Its Antecedents.- SECTION I: PARANOID AESTHETICS.- 2. The Menticide Sequence.- 3. Penetrating Images: Paranoia in Media Pedagogy.- 4. Pedagogy and Distance.- SECTION II: PARANOID SOCIETY.- 5. "The Last Judge": The Paranoid Social Machine of Jack T. Chick's Religious Tracts.- 6. Making America Great (Again and Again): Certainty, Centrality, and Paranoiac Pedagogies of Social Studies Education in the United States.- 7. Social Antibodies: Paranoid Impulses in Nativist Educational Reform.- SECTION III: PARANOID PEDAGOGIES.- 8. It's Been Getting Under My Skin: Paranoia, Parasitosis, and the Pedagogical Imperative.- 9. The Paranoid and Psychotic Pedagogies of Conspiracy Theory: Locating the Political in the Synthome of Conspiratorial Logics.- 10. Ad-hoc Means Necessity: An Assemblage Machine Infused with Paranoia for Generativity's Sake.