On learning and unlearning

Abstract

The concept of learning has obtained great popularity in many fields. In common cause with neo-liberal ideology, learning has led to a learnification process that turns social pathologies into individual deficits. Various ways out of this situation have been sought; chief among them is the recruitment of unlearning as a promising negation of learning and of its politics. Educational-philosophical, sociological, decolonial, as well as organizational and policy discourses valorize unlearning for different and often opposing reasons. However, as this article shows, unlearning has already been co-opted and utilized by learning discourses to advance the neo-liberal conception of learning. A further reaction to this usurpation of unlearning has been a tendency to premodify unlearning as ‘critical’ or ‘deep’. The present article critiques these conceptualizations and operationalizations of unlearning and argues for a more complex outlook on learning and unlearning than that which is currently predominant.