Experimental authority in the lecture theatre

Abstract

Authority is one of the most problematic and ambiguous concepts in social and educational theory. Authority is a relation that is based on disparities of knowledge, expertise or experience.Drawing on teaching observations and interviews with undergraduate students and lecturers about their experiences of large-group teaching, I argue that in contrast to lecturers' focus on professional authority and expertise, many students respond most strongly to experiential forms of authority in lectures. In other words, there is a disparity between students' and educators' conceptions of pedagogic authority. Through a discussion of a teaching intervention aiming to playfully experiment with authority relations in the lecture theatre, the paper contributes to a conceptualization of an emancipatory and experimental politics of educational authority, one where students are challenged, not only to think independently, but to see their own existencethe grounds for their actionsas an important intellectual problem to engage with. This requires moving beyond the dominant Weberian ideal types of educational authority (traditional, rational-legal, charismatic, and charismatic-intellectual) towards an fuller understanding of experiential forms of authority.

Geographies of authority

“…This emphasis on a political aesthetics of authority means it is important to extend current understandings of authority by asking how more egalitarian forms of authority might be co-constituted through experimental, collective, more-than-human practices that experiment with the forms and limits of experience (Bresnihan, 2015; Brigstocke, 2020a; Dawney, 2013; Millner, 2013). Authority is a relation that presupposes recognition of some form of inequality, and therefore it always sits in tension with a politics of equality (Arendt, 1961).…”