The aestemethical (anti-)pedagogy

Julia Romanowska

Chapter 20 in Leadership, Art, and Responsibility, 2026, pp 216-237 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter sets out the pedagogical philosophy of the Shibboleth concept as an aestemethical anti-pedagogy: an education grounded in aporia, detour, and ethical risk rather than in transmission, predefined outcomes, or the reassurance of method. Learning is not secured by explanation or safety, but brought into being through encounter, resistance, and exposure to otherness. Aestemethical pedagogy begins from trust in adults as subjects, and distinguishes subjectivity from identity: the leader is not reduced to a role, a competence profile, or a “leadership self”. It therefore resists pedagogies that fortify the ego, normalise confession, or replace moral seriousness with therapeutic sentimentality. Instead, it employs a threshold pedagogy of disturbance, where leaders are placed before what cannot be mastered, calculated, or anticipated, and where resistance becomes a creative force in subject-becoming. The chapter describes three interwoven practices: unsettling learning (metanoia through oblique passages rather than direct instruction); unsettling the ego (a displacement from self-enclosure towards the shared world); and unsettling emotional and ethical repression (an ethics of reality that refuses denial, alibis, and the instinct of self-preservation). In this framework, art is decisive not as an instrument for well-being or skill acquisition, but as dissensus: a rupture that fractures the familiar and opens perception to what was unseen. The art event is understood as an event that releases truth as fidelity, not knowledge to be possessed. The chapter closes by recalling art's darkest counter-image – culture as a weapon under Nazism – underscoring why aestemethical pedagogy must remain vigilant: it seeks not affective seduction, but answerability.

Keywords: Aestemethical Anti-pedagogy; Threshold Pedagogy; Disturbance and Resistance; Art as Dissensus; Shibboleth Performances; Ethical Subject-becoming; Event and Truth; Responsibility without Knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781049403991
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