Longing as learning, learning as longing: Insights and improvisations in a year of disrupted studies

Abstract

Whether a harbinger of a new era or an anomaly, the year 2020 confronted students and teachers alike with the necessity of reassessing and reformulating teaching and learning possibilities and practicalities. In this very subjective text, we examine some of our own experiences of higher education under lockdown and physical distancing conditions. In an apparent paradox, the changed conditions simultaneously added more stress and uncertainty to the students’ learning process while also providing the learners with more confidence to question the established norms. Against the background of ongoing systemic collapse, we explore our own and our students’ stories and poems chronicling learning in a time of crisis and constraint. Drawing on critiques of modern consumer capitalism underpinning management education, we use the experience of a ruptured semester to propose a reinterpretation of management learning as rooted in the paradoxes of desire and longing: for success, career, but also for enlightenment, revelation, social change and togetherness. We ask the reader to embrace the poetic and libidinal aspects of desire and longing as central to the transformative potential of the learning encounter and propose to reconstitute the basis for education as rooted in desire and longing: for contact, for learning, for revelation.