To speak of failure is to invite stigma; yet failure saturates our lives, shapes our experience and delineates the contours of our institutions. This special issue aims to face failure head on, to study, theorize, even cultivate it, to see if performance might provide us with a metaphor and methodology for failure. Focusing in particular on pedagogy, these essays, dialogues, ethnographies and theoretical reflections tap the analytic power of failure to chart the social, political, and affective terrain in which we teach and perform. For these authors, failure is neither a dead end nor a pit stop on the path to success, but a generative, subversive force.