In the spring of 2019, a sign was placed outside the doorway to an English classroom detailing the direct participation in enslavement by Robert Ryland, the first president of the University of Richmond. This chapter proposes that two questions (Why this? What are the conditions of arrival?), when asked in tandem, can open educational encounters to a specificity that pushes in on our perception and affects us even if humanist understandings of pedagogy—including “critical pedagogy”—seldom acknowledge it. At issue is how we might understand these questions as part of “event care” and how to modulate educational encounters that bloom into events in the most generative understanding of that term. Here, more-than-human emergence gathers as a blurry collective to reckon with the multidirectional violence that saturates the situations we move through, and holds space for improvisational maneuvers that disrupt education's humanist enclosures, reorienting study against what Sylvia Wynter calls Man.
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