Diffracting Difference and Disassembling "Post-Truth" Commonsense

• In Event: 43.080 - Sheraton Roundtable Six - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 43.080-6 - Differing Differences: Transnational Curriculum Spaces and Inquiries in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purposes: The post-truth era has emerged amidst long-term trends that influence how we make sense of the world around us (Birkenshaw, 2017). One strategy energizing the circulation of post-truth regimes is an appeal to commonsense, characterized as a “special kind of intuition belonging to the people” and employed in the service of nationalist, xenophobic and populist agendas (Rosenfeld, 2014). Commonsense, deployed in these ways, obscures and/or rejects understandings of difference that are saturated with complex histories, discourses, and materialities. In this paper/presentation, I work to disassemble some commonsensical understandings of difference by interrogating the ways the White woman teacher/Black male student “mismatch” is conceptualized in mainstream education.

Theoretical Framework/Modes of Inquiry: By diffracting commonsensical conceptualizations of White/female and Black/male relationalities through three, diversely situated, contemporary works of art, I engage with ways these artistic renderings of the oftentimes unstable and provocative entanglements of mismatched subjectivities in contemporary schools/society might be interpreted and articulated through poststructural and new materialist theoretical lenses. By deploying Haraway’s (1997) and Barad’s (2014) notions of diffraction as a concept and a post-qualitative research practice, I engage with multiple, theoretical and methodological perspectives as a way “to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s” (Kaiser and Thiele, 2014, p. 165).
Therefore, as I diffractively “read” these disparately situated works of contemporary, art, I work toward re-theorizing the mismatch as a concept, and as a subject-glomming “hub” in ways that articulate difference differently. By re-conceptualizing and articulating White woman teacher and Black male student connectivities and relationalities as existing within constantly changing material/discursive fields, I work against efforts to “represent” the mismatch as a commonsensical concept in contemporary education research. By enacting this move, my goal is to “shift the focus from representationalism and the hegemony of language/signification in our understandings of discursive practices, material processes and the production of knowledge” (Barrett & Bolt, 2013, p. xi) toward a notion of difference as articulation. Importantly, diffraction as a model of articulation seeks to acknowledge the co-constitutiveness of relational subjects that exist in different networks to those of [only] domination (Campbell, 2004, p. 175).
Thus, building on the assumption that the mismatch is a complex, material and discursive subject/object of study, this engagement with contemporary art is offered as a way to explore the knottiness of the discursive practices and materialities that contribute to [both] the obdurateness of essentialized identity categories [and] to their disassemblings. With this intention, this discussion engages with both new materialist and poststructural thinkers as a way to help us articulate and map:
the complex relationships amongst racialized and gendered subjectivities in contemporary U.S school; our representative practices of these subjectivities; and
ways that artistic production and creativity might disrupt commonsensical relationships between language, its role in representation, and knowledge (Barrett & Bolt, 2013, p. xii).
Significance: By shifting commonsensical understandings of relational difference in these ways, I work to interrogate relations between a “post-truth” politics and exacerbations of racial, class, and gender inequalities in education policy and practice.

Author

• Mary Newbery, Quinnipiac University