Diffracting Mismatch Subjectivities as Curriculum "Works in Progress"

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: . . . In-the-Making: Generating Curricular Possibilities With Janet L. Miller

Abstract

This paper is an engagement with curriculum theorizing inspired and influenced by Dr. Miller’s ongoing efforts to trouble the certainty of discourses constituting categorical identity by, instead taking part in, the difficult work of conceiving ‘curriculum,’ ‘selves,’ ‘identity,’ … ‘gender,’ and race…as works in progress” (Miller, 2005, pp. 5-6). Specifically, I put forth a notion of “intra-subjectivity” as a “work in progress” knowledge project that inquires into curriculum theorizing and studies through feminist, post-qualitative, poststructural, and new materialist lenses. In particular, I attend to ways that those lenses disrupt humanist versions of narrative, autobiography and unitary subjectivity (Miller, 2005). From this location, I attempt to extend curriculum conceived as an entanglement of “practices, structures, images, and experiences that can be identified and analyzed in various ways; i.e politically, racially, autobiographically, etc…” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2006, p. 16). By engaging with my own research around the discourses and materialities that constitute the “mismatch” between White women teachers and Black male students as a commonsensical concept in education, I explore ways Barad’s (2007) notion of “intra-activity” might be diffracted through/with Dr. Miller’s feminist, curriculum theorizing in an effort “to [continue to] trouble the link between acts, categories, representations desires and identities” (Miller, 2005, p. 220).
I thus take up Dr. Miller’s proffering of feminist inquiry as “a historically situated and discursively inflected practice…[that] posits subjects as irreducibly multiple, [and] calls attention to constructions of ‘identity’ as produced and sustained by cultural norms…” (2005, p. 47). I attempt to “work” rather than “work through” (Ellsworth & Miller, 2005, p. 180) the tensions that collide and collaborate amongst poststructural and new materialist renderings of feminism in an effort to interrupt the inevitability of “mismatch” discourses in U.S. public schools. Inspired by an enduring relationship amongst myself as White woman teacher/researcher and some of my former, Black male students, this inquiry seeks to trouble the obdurateness of “mismatch” discourses that work to constitute teacher/student collectivities and “unproblematized constructs of ‘teacher’ and ‘teacher stories’” (Miller, 2005, p. 51) by seeking to work difference differently (Barad, 2007, p. 82).
By diffracting Dr. Miller’s theorizing of autobiographical subjectivities as “works in progress” with Barad’s feminist, new materialist theories, I entangle their theorizings of subjectivity as part of a complicated conversation that shifts conceptions of theories as tools to help us reflect, explain or critique “the” world, toward theories perceived as participants in world-making (Barad, 2007). Crucially, from this perspective, theories are not abstracted from the lived bodies of the knower/known, but rather, “overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal” (Haraway, 1992, p. 299). Thus, theories are not just thoughts, they are happenings, constituted via the material/discursive entanglements of thinking/being as practice. Curriculum, theorizing, then, as an intra-subjective knowledge project and as an engagement with reconfiguring subjectivity might also be considered a form of worlding. Crucially, curriculum theorizing presumes that there is an ethical obligation to approach difference in schools in ways that acknowledge its complex manifestation and our obligation and opportunities to do things differently.

Author

• Mary Newbery, Quinnipiac University