Chiara Li Mandri

What is Dark Pedagogy?

Dark Pedagogy is an educational approach that invites learners to engage with the unsettling and often uncomfortable aspects of experience, rather than turning away from them. Instead of presenting knowledge as coherent and reassuring, Dark Pedagogy treats ambiguity and disturbance as meaningful sites for thinking.

Dark Pedagogy begins from the recognition that difficult affects (anxiety, confusion, sadness, disorientation) are not simply obstacles to learning, nor problems to be overcome. Rather, they can be understood as vital signals pointing to important features of the relationship between subject and reality. From this perspective, learning is not only about acquiring clarity, but about developing the capacity to remain with what resists immediate resolution.

Dark Pedagogy therefore creates spaces where learners can think together without the pressure to resolve complexity too quickly. It emphasises the importance of confronting uneasy feelings and difficult experiences, those moments that unsettle or resist articulation. It is a specific posture towards reality, a way of attending to what we might prefer not to face or see. It is the shared exploration of questions that may not have stable or satisfying answers, involving an exposure to the risk of thinking beyond its familiar limits.

Why Dark Pedagogy?

Many of the defining crises of our time exceed familiar frameworks of explanation. They resist simplification and cannot be addressed through linear or purely solution-oriented thinking. This condition has been described as the ‘metacrisis’: a structural and often invisible crisis that underlies many of the distinct crises shaping the contemporary world.

Dark Pedagogy emerges as an attempt to respond educationally to this condition of complexity. It resists reductive accounts and instead cultivates the ability to remain with what is opaque or overwhelming, without collapsing it into premature clarity.

Influences

Dark Pedagogy is informed by a constellation of traditions, including:

• Speculative realism
• Psychoanalysis
• Negative mysticism
• Ecological thought

Practising Dark Pedagogy

The first iteration of Dark Pedagogy was conducted at the University of Galway between January and April 2026 by Chiara Li Mandri, in co-facilitation with Michela Dianetti, and the support of the Public Philosophy Team Director and AIRE member Lucy Elvis, and collaborator Nicola Bozzi.

Dark Pedagogy uses the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) methodology as developed within P4C (IAPC), and in particular draws on Dr Lucy Elvis approach to this practice.

Two forthcoming essays will set out the methodology and practices that inform Dark Pedagogy.

If you would like to know more, you can consult the publications on the topic or get in touch at chiara@airecollective.org