Kingdoms of Ruin: Intuition as a Method at the Superimposition of Education, Time and the Pandemic

This chapter is an experiment in using intuition as a method (Cole and Mirzaei Rafe, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30:849–862, 2017) to investigate how articulations of time, education and more-than-humanness are linked. We do so by diving back into the leaking experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as a more-than-human event through the unexpected and provocative pupil’s response to an open-ended assignment for a languages class. By sensing the text and thinking with Deleuze’s concepts of Chronos and Aion, we strive to understand how articulations of time shape the educational experience, intentional and unintentional actions and, at the same time, our broader relation with the world. We also aim to gain insight into how the context of global politics shapes our possibilities to articulate time and experience in different ways. Departing from education, regimes of time and relation towards a more-than-human world, we argue for openness to difference, orientation towards process and processuality, as well as continuous movement and connection-making. We point out how these elements clash with the neoliberal agenda. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on using intuition as a method.