*This Is Not A Drill*

At the dawn of the new 20s, we are seeing a major shift in public perception around issues of equity and the climate emergency, paired with the reckoning that traditional ways of approaching these kinds of issues have led to failure. There is vast potential to shape not just policy interventions, but to help birth new and more equitable ways of knowing what the issues are, where they come from, and how they can be addressed.

We need a new public pedagogy to combine technology, the arts, critical thinking and activism to address the intractable social problems that are entangled with both the rise of technology and the climate emergency. 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.

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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.

ABOUT

The *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice collaboratively develops such a public pedagogy. It is led by Director and inaugural FIC Fellow Mona Sloane and explores what Arturo Escobar has called “designs for the pluriverse”: designs that account for the pluralities of being, that dismantle the harmful hierarchies that were created between human/non-human and culture/nature, and that reorient us towards sustainment, maintenance and care for each other and for the planet.

This year, the *This Is Not A Drill* program will support NYU Faculty Fellows, Community Fellows, and Student Fellows through research-focused reimbursable stipends. In addition to developing their individual *This Is Not a Drill* projects, fellows will regularly convene as the *This Is Not A Drill* working group. An exhibition of the fellows' work will take place in the Fall.

If you are interested in learning more about *This Is Not A Drill*, please email Program Director Mona Sloane at mona.sloane@nyu.edu.