Mark Frederick Houghton

Biography

Beginning his career as a technician in theatrical performance, Mark eventually left the world of event production in order to better understand the conditions of precarious labor and the dominant narratives that insist success is merely a matter of hard work, productivity, and cheerful acceptance of a neoliberal worldview. Now a Flex-Time Ph.D. candidate whose doctoral work develops what he terms “critical resilience pedagogy” and a contemporary “care of the self,” Mark draws on Feminist Affect Theory, Emotion Studies, Neo-Stoic thought, and the Philosophy of Education to interrogate the culturally constructed discourse that, since early modernity, has positioned young people as problem-laden “precarious subjects.” Amid the saturated alarmism surrounding AI and within the realities of neoliberal post-Fordism, Mark’s project argues that navigating an increasingly precarious future will require young people to develop the capacity—and the resilience—to reinvent themselves repeatedly over the course of their lives, without being undone by the crushing anxiety that often accompanies the forced deconstruction of meaning, purpose, and self. By reframing “precarity” as an inclusive, agentive process of subject formation, Mark’s project turns to cultivated and teachable practices of the self—practices through which teachers and other pedagogues might offer young people a feasible, attainable way to navigate an uncertain future of work and defend themselves against the highly sophisticated targeting from social platforms, Big Tech, and attention capitalism, writ large.