We live in an increasingly vulnerable world in which our sensibilities are continuously challenged by climate breakdown, war, and repressive governments challenging the belief that politics can deal with the precariousness of life today and, specifically, the transitions to a sustainable life democratically (Malm 2020). Democracy, as Jacques Rancière (2006) has pointed out, is itself under threat. In this paper, we will discuss the dimension of education and a liveable life that keeps a democratic, open society alive and well-functioning by acknowledging what Franco Bifo Berardi (2017) has suggested: that the fundamental crisis of our times is the inability to understand our sensibilities as simultaneously shared with others. One can view this crisis through Rancière’s (2007), notion of le partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible), which signals how our ‘sense’ is regulated through ‘regimes of perception’. He suggests breaking out of these regimes to instantiate new forms of sensibility by creating a ‘perceptual shock’. This shock, for Rancière, speaks equally to the politics of aesthetics and education and can lead to more expansive framings of sustainability and democratic transitions (Säfström & Loughran, in press). Specifically, we argue that not only people but all living beings are sensible in this way and potentially included in an expanding responsibility for the world. Along these lines, we argue that a democratic transition requires expanding our sense of what ‘equality’ and the ‘public’ can mean, seeing them as part of an ecology that is not only embedded within human-centred society but within larger worlds with which we are entangled. Taking Rancière’s focus on the notion of democracy as always involving the claiming of equality, an education committed to democratic transitions would entail opening spaces where humans begin to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ differently: attuning to more than human others who also have a part in the distribution of the sensible (Todd 2023). We claim that this requires an educational practice committed to opening encounters with other life forms in ways that shift the borders of what Rancière calls ‘common sense’. If it is now common sense to perceive and sense the world as separate from ‘us’, then a primary educational task is about creating a ‘perceptual shock’ needed to world the world anew.

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