Complicity as a Good Tool for New Times: Thinking Gandhi in Education as Insurrecting Interiority in Life Histories Research

• In Event: Why Gandhi Now? Reclaiming Education for the Social Majorities

Abstract

Objectives
This essay positions postmodern life histories research with its insistence on multiple interpretations and complicities in tension with conventional educational biographies where mapping the past is the sort of gold standard of educational research. Using the concept of “insurrecting interiority” as an index of such tensions, the paper argues for complicity as an ontological and historical site by which to read and become Gandhian. What all this might mean for curriculum theorizing is handled through five ordeals of undecidability, allegories taken from Gandhi’s life, that are helpful in working against paralytic thought and method. The essay concludes with a “disjunctive affirmation” of infinite ways of approaching “democratizing interiority” in terms of finding ways into less comfortable life histories educational research where difficult questions of truth, agency, and responsibility mark a praxis of moving on.

Theoretical Framework
This paper extends the theoretical movements born out of postmodern and poststructural thought in curriculum studies (see Cherryholmes, 1988; Lather, 2009). My work is also guided by postmodern life histories research (Tierney, 2000) and work in educational biographies (Kridel,1998; Pinar, 2001). Moreover, I have been interested in more recent work in proliferation (Malewski, 2009; Lather, 2006), complicity (Ellsworth, 1997), and concrete approaches to enacting social reformation in the current educational nightmare.

Methods
Over the course of a decade, I have studied representations of Gandhi in historical literature. I have documented various portrayals of Gandhi, from ones that celebrate his journey toward sainthood to those that index his shortcomings and errors and provide alternate feasible readings. Out of my typographies, I have focused upon disjuncture and difference and, more recently, how an insurrection of interiority might inform contemporary praxis. More specific, I highlight how Gandhi’s emphasis on democratization of interiority highlights our own complicity, particularly a preoccupation with disciplinary knowledge.

Results
Within my presentation, through a discussion of Gandhi’s self-transformation I highlight how democratization of interiority, through an insurrection of self, precluded social reconstruction. I display how more recent interest in subject-centered curriculum and disciplinary knowledge results in narratives within curriculum studies that lack an actionable dimension and issues of undecideability. As well, I illuminate the need for further life histories research that does less to focus upon teaching the past to students and more upon the relevancy of a performativity of the past for thinking through contemporary everyday practices.

Significance
While there is a plethora of research on Gandhi, much of it biographical, there is a dearth of research that explores how Gandhi might inform contemporary thought and practice in education. The result is that Gandhi lacks practical force in regards to contemporary educational dilemmas. Accordingly, this paper sheds light on what postmodern forms of life history research might do to draw representations of Gandhi into relationship with the present. I utilize Gandhi to highlight recent preoccupations with disciplinarity as a sort of delusion of certainty that sidesteps important questions over our moving on within the unknown. This paper contributes to rethinking notions of social and educational reconstruction by way of proliferating curriculum.

Author

• Erik L. Malewski, Kennesaw State University