A radical pedagogy for the present cannot be organised around the transmission of stable contents, but around the capacity to read across heterogeneous worlds: texts, bodies, infrastructures, affects, ecologies, machines, informal settlements, images and digital systems. The works gathered here do not form a single doctrine; they compose a pedagogical field. Their common lesson is that knowledge is not an object delivered from teacher to student, but a situated practice of attention, relation, material interpretation and collective transformation. To teach, in this sense, is to build conditions for crossing: between close reading and machine reading, between urban form and social life, between technical media and geology, between cosmology and art, between autonomy and design, between inconvenience and coexistence.
N. Katherine Hayles offers the clearest methodological entry point. In How We Think, she argues that contemporary reading can no longer be reduced to the humanist ideal of close reading. Close reading remains essential, but it must interact with hyper reading and machine reading. Hyper reading scans, filters, juxtaposes and navigates large informational environments; machine reading detects patterns beyond the scale of individual attention. For pedagogy, this is decisive: students should not be forced to abandon their digital habits in order to enter “serious” knowledge; rather, education must teach them to move between depth, speed and scale. Hayles’s strongest pedagogical proposal is not technological enthusiasm, but a plural literacy in which attention becomes a scarce and ethical resource. Learning occurs through the orchestration of different cognitive rhythms.
Cross-reading therefore becomes a discipline of relation. It is not merely comparing books, but learning how one conceptual field illuminates the blind spots of another. Reading Berlant after Hayles, for example, shows that attention is never neutral: it is affectively disturbed by the inconvenience of others. Berlant’s concept of inconvenience names the ordinary pressure of coexistence, the friction by which other people, objects and worlds interrupt the fantasy of sovereignty. A classroom shaped by this idea would not imagine dialogue as smooth consensus. It would treat irritation, ambivalence, fatigue and disagreement as part of learning. Pedagogy becomes the art of staying with difficulty without immediately converting it into moral clarity or institutional order.
This matters especially for architectural and urban education. Urban Informality and the Built Environment shows that informality is not a residual condition outside planning, but a relational system of infrastructures, exchanges and images. Its chapter on “informality as pedagogy” is crucial: children’s maps, craft practices and tapestry-making in Mariamma Nagar are understood as collective design pedagogy. Learning emerges from bricolage, improvisation, collaboration and situated material intelligence. This reverses the colonial hierarchy between formal knowledge and informal practice. The informal settlement becomes not only a problem to solve, but a method for thinking design otherwise.
Moraci, Bevilacqua and Pizzimenti extend this pedagogical problem into ecological and digital urban planning. Their edited volume frames ecosystem services as measurable yet politically charged urban infrastructures. Adaptive planning does not impose a fixed future; it works through indicators, monitoring, scenarios and revision. Pedagogically, this means teaching students to think with uncertainty. A studio or seminar should not only ask for a final project, but for a model of adaptive reasoning: What data matters? Who benefits from ecological transition? What is measured, and what remains invisible? How can green infrastructure produce care rather than gentrification?
Here, Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory becomes a useful counterweight. If ecological and digital planning tends toward indicators and models, Thrift reminds us that social life also unfolds through practices, affects, gestures, atmospheres and fugitive intensities. Pedagogy cannot be reduced to representation, nor to measurable outputs. Much of what matters in learning happens before it becomes explicit knowledge: a bodily orientation, a rhythm of attention, a way of sensing space, a confidence to experiment. Teaching should therefore include description, walking, mapping, performance, sound, drawing, bodily perception and the study of atmospheres. This is not anti-theoretical; it is theory expanded toward practice.
The media-theoretical texts radicalise the same argument. Fuller and Goffey’s “evil media studies” asks us to bypass representation and examine the stratagems through which media systems operate. A critical pedagogy of media should therefore not only analyse images or messages, but protocols, defaults, interfaces, databases, metrics, automatisms and manipulative infrastructures. Students must learn how systems act before they signify. This is a vital lesson for contemporary design education: power often works below the level of discourse, through convenience, friction, capture, nudging and infrastructural habit.
Parikka’s A Geology of Media then pushes media pedagogy below the interface, toward extraction, minerals, energy and waste. Digital culture is not immaterial: it is made from lithium, copper, rare earths, labour, logistics and toxic residues. A cross-reading between Parikka and ecological urbanism reveals that the “digital transition” cannot be pedagogically separated from material responsibility. Teaching digital design without geology reproduces a false abstraction. The laptop, the sensor, the smart city, the data centre and the urban dashboard must be read as planetary objects.
Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology adds another layer: objects are not merely resources for human use, but entities with their own withdrawn realities. His object-oriented pedagogy would cultivate wonder, description and “carpentry”: making things in order to think with things. For art, architecture and urbanism, this is powerful. A wall, a pipe, a sensor, a tree canopy, a chair, a dataset or a broken device should not be treated only as evidence of social meaning. Each also has its own operations, affordances and resistances. Pedagogy becomes a practice of decentring the human without abandoning political responsibility.
Yuk Hui’s work deepens this through cosmotechnics. In Art and Cosmotechnics, art is not decoration but the education of sensibility: a way of reopening philosophy after the exhaustion of Western technological universalism. Cross-reading Hui with Escobar is especially fertile. Both resist the idea that modern technology or design can be universal. Hui asks for plural cosmotechnical futures; Escobar asks for autonomous design oriented toward the pluriverse and the communal. Together they suggest that pedagogy must not train students to apply global solutions everywhere, but to ask what world a technique belongs to, what forms of life it sustains, and what relations it destroys or enables.
Nader’s Naked Science is indispensable here because it exposes the politics of knowledge boundaries. Science is not rejected, but stripped of its innocence. It becomes visible as a situated practice shaped by institutions, authority, exclusion and cultural hierarchy. A transdisciplinary pedagogy needs precisely this anthropological vigilance. Students should learn to ask not only “is this true?” but also “who has the authority to define truth here?”, “what knowledge has been excluded?”, and “how do local, Indigenous, technical, artistic and embodied forms of knowledge interrogate one another?”
Brenner’s theory of scale offers the urban counterpart to this epistemic lesson. The city cannot be taught as a bounded object. Urbanisation is multiscalar, produced through local, regional, national, global and planetary processes. A pedagogy of urbanism must therefore train scalar literacy: the ability to connect a pavement, a neighbourhood, a housing policy, a logistics corridor, a financial instrument, a climate regime and a planetary metabolic process. Cross-reading Brenner with Urban Informality prevents both romantic localism and abstract globalism. The local is never merely local; the planetary is always materially situated.
John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds helps give this pedagogy an elemental dimension. Media are not only technologies of communication; they are environments of order: clouds, fire, sea, sky, time, inscription. This expands pedagogy beyond devices and toward atmospheres. To teach media, urbanism or art is also to teach the conditions that hold life together: air, water, weather, light, rhythm, storage, orientation. In this sense, pedagogy becomes infrastructural and elemental at once.
The pedagogical model that emerges from these cross-readings has five principles. First, it is relational: nothing is studied alone. Every object is read through its infrastructures, affects, histories and ecologies. Second, it is multimodal: students read texts, maps, images, data, materials, atmospheres and practices. Third, it is situated: knowledge begins from place, but does not remain trapped in locality. Fourth, it is adaptive: learning includes monitoring, revision, uncertainty and failure. Fifth, it is ethical without being moralistic: it does not seek purity, but sharper responsibility within entangled conditions.
Such a pedagogy would be especially suited to art, architecture and urban studies. A seminar might place Berlant beside planning theory to ask how public space is felt as inconvenience. A design studio might read Parikka alongside smart-city discourse to trace the mineral life of sensors. A theory course might pair Hayles with Hui to connect digital literacy with the education of sensibility. A mapping exercise might move from informal settlements to ecosystem services, asking how different forms of knowledge become visible or remain illegible. A doctoral methodology seminar might use Nader, Thrift and Fuller to question how evidence, practice and power are constructed.
The conclusion is simple but demanding: pedagogy must become a practice of crossed attention. To educate is not to simplify the world into disciplinary units, but to give students methods for staying with its complexity without paralysis. The teacher becomes less a master of content than a curator of encounters, a designer of frictions, a guardian of rigour and a companion in uncertainty. In this framework, reading is not passive reception but world-making. Cross-reading is a radical educational method because it trains the mind, the senses and the political imagination to perceive relations that the disciplines alone often conceal.
References
Amorós Elorduy, N., Sinha, N. and Marx, C. (eds.) (2024) Urban Informality and the Built Environment: Infrastructure, Exchange and Image. London: UCL Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800086265.
Berlant, L. (2022) On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bogost, I. (2012) Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Brenner, N. (2019) New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. New York: Oxford University Press.
Escobar, A. (2017) Autonomía y diseño: La realización de lo comunal. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
Fuller, M. (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fuller, M. and Goffey, A. (2012) ‘Toward an Evil Media Studies’, in Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Hui, Y. (2016) On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hui, Y. (2021) Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press / e-flux.
Moraci, F., Bevilacqua, C. and Pizzimenti, P. (eds.) (2025) Ecological and Digital Transition in Cities: Measuring Ecosystem Services for Urban Planning and Design. Cham: Springer Nature. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82927-7.
Nader, L. (ed.) (1996) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.
Parikka, J. (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Peters, J.D. (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London and New York: Routledge
