"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
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003461838
ORCID
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.
