"Feeling pedagogy’s affective and material flashpoints in the science fiction animation 'Zima Blue'” in Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1: Arts and Humanities-Based Rethinkings of Interconnection, Technologies, and Education
ORCID
Document Type
Chapter in a Book
Publication Date
12-1-2023
Abstract
Informed by Julietta Singh’s call for a dehumanist education to defy calcified colonial desires of human mastery and classification, this chapter takes a new materialist approach to excavate pedagogy’s flashpoints present in “Zima Blue,” an episode from the 2019 science fiction animated series, Love, Death & Robots. The episode follows Zima, a brilliant and cybernetically augmented artist whose work focuses on a specific shade of blue before the unveiling of their final masterpiece. The narrative ontologically unsettles human/nonhuman boundaries and demonstrates how this unsettling can disrupt subject-object distinctions taken for granted in contemporary educational habits despite the increasing entanglement of artificial intelligence and similar technologies. The chapter addresses three flashpoints: the material pull of the color blue, how Zima troubles the presumed educational subject, and the unruliness of pedagogical transformation. I suggest that paying attention to the affective and material dimensions of Zima’s blurred bodily distinctions between machine, artist, and artist-machine provokes the emergence of pedagogical flashpoints forefronting ethical and entangled ways of relating to others and things in the world.
Recommended Citation
Sojot, A. N. (2023). Feeling Pedagogy’s Affective and Material Flashpoints in the Science Fiction Animation “Zima Blue." In B. Baker, A. Saari, L. Wang, & H. Tavares (Eds.), Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1: Arts and Humanities-Based Rethinkings of Interconnection, Technologies, and Education. Routledge.