Life at Large: New Materialisms for a (Re)new(ing) Curriculum of Social Studies Education

• In Event: 33.052 - New Materialist Education 1: Cultural Studies and the Power of Things

Abstract

The title for this paper is a direct lift from Vicki Kirby’s 2011 book Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. As a researcher, educator, and advocate of the U.S. curricular construction known as “social studies,” I made Kirby’s book my first read of new materialist thought in part from its title as anthropology remains one of the monarchical disciplines that in turn disciplines what is knowable within the alchemy of social studies education. Kirby’s is a vigorous voice in the tent of new materialist thought, urging scholars amongst the ruins of science, humanities, and their offspring (social science, law, education, et al.) to see outward from the intercourses of feminism and deconstructionism, biology and geology. Nature vs. nurture, culture vs. science, inside vs. outside are all bouts of intellectual squaring off Kirby and her new materialist colleagues call out as stalled and in need of new ententes. My paper outlines how the propositions of Kirby and two related new materialists may be what Jeffrey Nealon (2012) describes as a “just-in-time cultural logic” for theorizing curriculum as educationalists scramble to explore expanded horizons of post-postmodern thought in a moment when (post)modernism yet remains a novel and unexhausted mode of theorizing curriculum in our field. As ideas generated from new materialist theories arrive to disrupt curriculum thought in mathematics education (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014; Parks & Schemiechel, 2014); science education (Gough, 2011); and art education (Rotas & Springgay, 2013; Schulte, 2013), social studies education remains bereft of any similar theorizing. My paper forecasts how new materialist thought renews the moribund field of social studies (currently content with teaching patriotism, allegiance, and industriousness) by activating dormant traits originally expressed when social studies was conceived in 1916 as a melding of disciplines into an organic exaltation of life. The “origin story” of social studies education in the U.S. resembles much of the animating questions of new materialist projects with a shared affirmation of culture, nature, bodies, and becoming. After this brief historical exposition, I actuate arguments drawn from my recent conceptual research into immanence as a mode of social studies education to undermine the dichotomies of nature/culture, body/society, and interiority/exteriority. To do so I illustrate how social studies education can again invite students and teachers to an in-between-ness of fragile worlds while eschewing transcendental dreams of “becoming effective citizens” (to quote the National Council for the Social Studies). Such theorizing favors instead a “becoming-with” one’s world that assembles the disciplinary tools of social studies into a new materialist construct of “the mangle of practice” (Pickering, 2010) that interrogates nature/culture for multiple planetary existences. In explicating three examples of new materialism—Kirby’s quantum anthropology (2011), Bennett’s political ecology (2009), and Borgerson’s flickering consumer (2013)—I (re)compose figurations of social studies with these three theoretical constructs to offer a vision of teaching “life at large” as a challenge for social studies educators to elect teaching for ontologies of immanence rather than destructive epistemologies of control and transcendence.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University