ABSTRACT
The commons has reemerged in the last two decades as a strategy of critique and radical democratic aspiration in the social sciences, humanities, education, and social movements. Building on recent scholarship in educational theory that explores educational organization, pedagogy, and politics associated with neoliberal tendencies toward commodification, precarity, debt, and austerity, this chapter analyzes three challenges to educational commons—new enclosures and civil war, perspectives on decolonization, and ecological crises in the Anthropocene—that reflect the exhaustion of capitalism as a world-system that can no longer contain the catastrophes it creates. Educational commons provide the basis for a mode of critique that is useful for forging solidarities and imagining futures, as well an ethico-political aspiration for forms of liberation that incorporate difference, relationality, and commonality.
