The Department of Art Education is thrilled and proud to announce that Dr. jessie beier has been appointed as assistant professor in a tenure-track appointment as of May 15 2024. Many of you know Dr. beier in her current role as assistant professor (LTA) and we are very fortunate to continue to learn from and leverage her innovative teaching, research, research-creation and apprenticeship practices.
Dr. jessie beier (MEd, PhD) is a teacher, artist, researcher, philosopher, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for unthought educational futures. Working at the intersection of art, philosophy, and pedagogy, jessie’s research-creation practice aims to mutate and upend dominant visions of educational futurity so as to speculate otherwise on pedagogical possibility in an era of ecocatastrophe.
Bringing educational theory and practice in contact with contemporary conversations within fields such as Anthropocene studies, environmental feminisms, critical disability studies, queer ecological theory, energy humanities and extinction studies, jessie’s research aims to develop what she calls a weird pedagogy, or an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a speculative programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to actualize, in collective ways, desired pedagogical otherworlds.
As an educator, jessie has taught in a wide range of formal and informal learning contexts—from secondary school classrooms and university courses to art museums and prison libraries—and her scholarly work has been published in journals including Animal Studies Journal, Visual Arts Research, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy. She is the author of Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); co-editor of Sound Research for Troubling Times: Hope in Crisis (with Owen Chapman, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2024) and Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene (with jan jagodzinski, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); and an author, designer and illustrator of Energy Emergency Repair Kit (with the E.E.R.K. Collective, Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2024).
As an artist-researcher, jessie has presented her work—through exhibitions, public workshops and conferences/symposia—both locally and inter/nationally and has been involved in numerous interdisciplinary, collaborative research-creation projects including Landscape of Hate/Hope (Concordia University), Speculative Energy Futures (University of Alberta), After Oil School (University of Alberta, McGill University), Just Powers (University of Alberta) and the Research-¬Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (University of Alberta). Through this work, jessie has developed an artistic practice that deploys sonic, video, textual, illustrated, and relational elements in order to stage speculative scenarios (i.e. immersive reading rooms and pop-up dinner parties) and/or platforms for collective, improvised, and emergent durational residencies, installations and performances (i.e. youth-led exhibitions, DJ and VJ interventions, and musical showcases).
Most recently, jessie was a Postdoctoral Horizon Fellow (2021-2023) and Assistant Professor (LTA) in Art Education (2023-2024) at Concordia University, where she has been working with colleagues and students in the undergraduate and graduate program, as well as school and community teachers, administrators, secondary students, and artists, to co-construct pedagogical theories and practices that aim to resituate--through collectivity, sustainability, and care--the hard work of pedagogy today.