Education and Violation: Conceptualizing Power, Domination, and Agency in the Hidden Curriculum

• In Event: Roundtable Session 106
  In Roundtable Session: Questioning Curricular Norms: Just Wars, Best Practices, and Hidden Curriculum

Abstract

This conceptual paper offers a theory of violation that exposes power as a simultaneous process of construction and destruction. Starting from key principles in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, the paper describes violation as active and motivated rather than the mere by-product of a more fundamental imperative of reproduction. This analysis foregrounds the process of assault that characterizes the hidden curriculum for marginalized students, particularly with regard to the clinical and academic discourses that work to label identities. The paper shows that the pathologization of students by these discourses is more complex than the simple circulation of norms, and that this process is always characterized by a simultaneous struggle for resistance and survival.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin