Democratic ruptures: Student dissensus as democratic engagements in performance-oriented school settings

Critical scholars argue that schools have been reduced to “production factories” (Rüsselbæk Hansen & Phelan, 2019:37). As Sidorkin puts it, schools are wastebasket-oriented economies “organized for the purpose of managing the useless activity of learning” (2004:260). A key critique raised by Sidorkin is that we expect students to be motivated to engage in these alienating activities even when their work is never used. In this paper, I will argue that student dissensus (e.g., cheating, resisting) can be viewed as a modality of democratic participation and meaning-making in schools saturated by performance, efficiency, and output-oriented rationalities (Keddie, 2016; Petersen & Krogh, 2021). Drawing on the work of Ranciére (and others using his work), the paper follows the notion that democracy is a practice that “calls into question the given by inscribing ‘the count of the uncounted, or part of those who have no part’” (Rüsselbæk Hansen & Phelan, 2019:45). Drawing on qualitative empirical examples from Danish classrooms, the paper illustrates and discusses how students engage with and circumvent meaningless activities during project work, and how this may be understood as enactments of dissensus, i.e., “sporadic and happenstance occurrences that break through the consensus logics of institutions and society” (McDonnell, 2022:171), asserting themselves as subjects of equality rather than objects subjected to alienating practices. Dissensus refers to a rupture in the established order of perception, speech, and participation; it is the moment when those ‘who have no part’ assert their equality by acting or speaking in ways that the (current) order does not authorize (Rancière, 2021). When students cheat, protest, or resist, these acts can be interpreted as interventions in the order of schooling; as democratic gestures that expose the contradictions between the ideals of (democratic) participation and the realities of performance-driven education. The paper thus seeks to critically discuss alternative ways of understanding and engaging with student dissensus that move beyond individualized problem discourses, instead demanding critical, courageous and emergent listening (Davies, 2016) to understand student dissensus as 1) signs of democratic engagements, and 2) invitations to reimagine the conditions of education itself (Størup, 2025). References Davies, B. (2016). Emergent listening. In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds), Qualitative Inquiry Through a Critical Lens (0 edn, pp. 73–84). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315545943 Keddie, A. (2016). Children of the market: Performativity, neoliberal responsibilisation and the construction of student identities. Oxford Review of Education, 42(1), 108–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1142865 McDonnell, J. (2022). Reading Rancière for Education: An Introduction. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96013-1 Petersen, A., & Krogh, S. Chr. (2021). Præstationskultur. Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Rancière, J. (2021). Ti teser om politik (Gustav Johannes Hoder, Ed.; Anton Sylvest Lilleør, Trans.; 1. udgave). Aleatorik. Rüsselbæk Hansen, D., & Phelan, A. M. (2019). Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education. Research in Education, 103(1), 34–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034523719836671 Sidorkin, A. M. (2004). In the Event of Learning: Alienation and Participative Thinking in Education. Educational Theory, 54(3), 251–262. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0013-2004.2004.00018.x Størup, J. O. (2025). ”Og så skal det også bare lyde klogt-agtigt”—Elevers kodeknækkeri under projektarbejde i udskolingen. Dansk Pædagogisk Tidsskrift.