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Introduction
[The] question becomes, how do we re-create and recommunalize our worlds? How do we develop forms of knowing that do not take words and beings and things out of the flow of life--that is, forms of knowing and being that do not recompose nature as external to us, as dead or unsentient matter?
—Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse
At the dawn of the new '20s, the world is reckoning with the fact that the climate emergency is here. Images of wildfires, polluted water pouring out of taps, and unimaginably destructive floods forcefully bring into focus what our most vulnerable communities have long known: the climate emergency is an equity issue.
Public perception is now catching up-and with it, comes the recognition that traditional ways of knowing and addressing climate equity have led to failure, and that there are no easy technological fixes at hand. Artistic imagination and creative ways of learning and knowing are crucial for avoiding the binary traps of techno-optimism or -skepticism which so often lead to paralysis. They are instrumental to birthing more equitable ways of knowing what the issues are, where they come from, and how they can be addressed.
*This Is Not A Drill* embodies this effort. It is a program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts that is directed by Mona Sloane and that fosters creative and critical thinking around the intractable social problems that are entangled with the rise of technology and the climate emergency.
As a project of the Future Imagination Fund at the Tisch School of the Arts, *This Is Not A Drill* works to create a new public pedagogy around technology, the arts, critical thinking, and activism.
A public pedagogy is an emerging assemblage of forms, processes, and sites of education and learning that occur beyond formal educational practices. This assemblage often brings into focus cultural, artistic, performative, critical, and activist pedagogical approaches to learning in the public sphere. A public pedagogy also sets out to redefine education by exploring posthuman reconceptualizations of pedagogy that push beyond anthropocentric modes of performative rationality, binarism and colonialism.