The traditional approach within radical pedagogy has been to pursue liberatory social justice agendas in order to promote and achieve political transformation. Yet inequality endures. Might radical pedagogy need to reconceptualize the link between liberation and transformation? Perhaps, I argue here, it is time to think differently about the relationship between social justice and political transformation. Turning to Jacques Rancière’s theory of the political I consider how it might help us think differently about the space radical pedagogy creates for social transformation. Can new horizons open for transformative possibility if a radical pedagogy sheds its social justice mission? Taking a philosophical approach, I begin by problematizing the relationship between social justice and equality, arguing that this relationship at best distorts and at worst sacrifices transformative possibilities. This argument is extended to education as a social institution as I explore the ways in which institutionalizing emancipatory goals in education, even radical education, inhibits political transformation itself. Instead of seeing this as a doomsday message for radical pedagogy, I seek to re-open a discussion of what is possible by identifying four philosophical shifts that enable a reimagining of the radical pedagogical agenda. Employing these shifts, I argue that locating and imagining transformative possibility, which I call a process of iteration, may be a more fruitful path for radical pedagogy than adhering to a traditional conception of liberatory goals. Following what I take to be part of Rancière’s own philosophical practice, I offer one example of this iterative process as the search for and study of what I refer to as “anachronistic possibility”—that is, the exploration of transformative events in the past which our present leads us to believe are no longer possible. I suggest that processes of iteration offer the potential for an alternative transformative space, one in which the unexpected becomes possible and the limits of possibility can be disrupted.

This paper takes a philosophical approach to explore the research question. It engages in a close textual analysis of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the political, focusing particularly on the concept of equality, in an effort to uncover the theory’s implications for education. These implications are applied in a post-critical critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of the radical pedagogical discourse and the context these assumptions create for political learning.

This paper concludes that social transformation and social justice are incompatible goals for radical pedagogy because rather than opening a transformative space these goals limit and, potentially, inhibit transformative possibility. Instead, an alternative commitment is proposed for radical pedagogy, a commitment to cultivating, remembering and imagining unexpected possibility. Through my analyses I conclude that it is only when there is potential for the unexpected that societal relations can be transformed.