Sunny Dhillon: pedagogies of discomfort and the neoliberal university

In this podcast, Sunny Dhillon takes us on a long journey, through philosophy, pedagogy and personal training, in a testament to the power of metaphor. Although wellbeing sounds like an innocuous, even desirable goal for students and for higher education to pursue, Sunny’s thesis is that it is ill-advised to be well adapted to a society that is so sick. In our individualised, neoliberalised form of responsibility, it can be difficult to see that ‘wellbeing’ might in fact mean deliberately discomfiting ourselves and embracing the ambiguity of true inquiry. This pedagogy of discomfort is all about having difficult conversations, challenging accepted viewpoints, and resisting the hegemonic discourses around the notions of success and wellbeing in academia. Taking decolonisation in his sights as the next means by which higher education seeks to address the problems of retention and student satisfaction without necessarily tackling the systemic sources of those problems, Sunny proposes that learning developers have an important role to play, being both outsiders and insiders and having the ability to create space for these difficult conversations. The resources we mentioned Mumford method: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Arts/Documents/MumfordMethod.pdf Etymologist: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3234647.Mark_Forsyth Decolonisation article: https://journals.sfu.ca/pie/index.php/pie/article/view/1377 Personal blog - https://dsdhillon.medium.com/ And the paper we talked about Dhillon, S. (2018) “Whose wellbeing is it anyway?”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.460.