Introduction

Within modern educational discourses there has been a rather quiet revolution simmering for years. This revolution turns on a familiar yet underappreciated educational idea: studying. We might trace study back to Montaigne's mental wanderings in Essays or Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, both of which embrace the distraction, wayfaring, and meandering deviations of study over and above single-minded focus and tangible results. For both, study offers a unique educational form of life that is not reducible to learning (with its emphasis on attention, productivity, and output measurement). Despite their insights, such voices have remained marginal in the educational canon, often dismissed as romantically escapist or (even worse) elitist. Then, in 1971, Robert McClintock published the seminal essay titled "Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction." McClintock foresaw an educational landscape dominated by teaching and learning, leaving little time or place for study to happen. Like those before him, McClintock's prophecy remained largely unheeded, but with the increasingly hegemonic power of the discourses of learning, it would seem that now more than ever, a turn to study is urgent. Indeed, students are learners, teachers are learning facilitators, schools are learning facilities, and even workers are being reconceptualized as lifelong learners. We might venture to call the resulting landscape a "learning society" (Masschelein, Simons, Bröckling, & Pongratz, 2007) or a society defined in relation to learning objectives, assessments, and debt. Coupled with the Great Recession, the neoliberalization of the university, and various Occupy Movements across the globe, insurgent calls for study (as an education that is collective, debt-free, and resistant to administration, measurement, and ideologies of productivity) suddenly appeared in a number of places. McClintock never felt more contemporary.

For instance, Luka Arsenjuk and Michelle Koerner (2009) argued against the categorization of the student as a depoliticized educational consumer and/or indentured servant subjected to various administrative and managerial discourses and practices of learning. Instead, they called for a renewed struggle for study as an unprofessional activity. In the book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten highlighted the importance of subaltern educational practices that suspend the logic of debt supporting neoliberal university structures and return education to free use via collective study. Also in 2013, I published my book On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality, which attempted to think through the unique ontological, political, aesthetic, temporal, and collective nature of study. It is important to highlight the simultaneousness of these independent turns toward study to address the poverty of educational life under neoliberalism.

Since the publication of these early texts, study as a concept has continued to appear in educational philosophy and theory as a topic of concern. Here, we can cite Samuel Rocha's phenomenology of study (2015) as well as the important volume edited by Claudia W. Ruitenberg titled Reconceptualizing Study in Educational Discourse and Practice (2017). Also of note are experiments in the politics of study practiced and theorized by Derek Ford (2016). In my own work, I have taken seriously my theory of the importance of studying together and have co-authored a number of articles in a variety of journals including essays on the studious university (Backer & Lewis, 2015), studious research (D'Hoest & Lewis, 2015), and the studious potentiality of philosophical dialogue in classrooms (Jasinski & Lewis, 2015).

While there are certainly disagreements between all of these various perspectives on studying, what they all agree on is that the logic of learning is not sufficient for articulating the whole of education. Implicit in many of these approaches is that the dominance of learning silences alternative practices that might not abide by its rules or assumptions. As such, we must struggle for study. While learning theory and practice continually attempt to subsume study (in the form of study skills, for instance), there remains something within study and within the practices of studiers that prefers not to accommodate learning imperatives and outcomes.

The following collection brings art and design education into dialogue with studying. We begin with a contribution from Daniel Friedrich, Peter Hyland, and myself on the design and implementation of a "studious" conference. We draw...