Curricular Multiplicities and Constant Cultural Translations

• 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 2019 AERA Call urges researchers’ inquiries into “post-truth” exacerbations of racial, class, and gender inequalities in education policy and practice. Here, I aim to examine “cultural translation” as a necessary component of “differing differences,” a generative concept that frames multiplicities of “the other” as integral to curriculum theorizings and creatings that prioritize equality in all educative endeavors.

Theoretical Framework: In working to combat current and extreme positionings of an “other” who often does not receive equitable access to educational opportunities, I prioritize feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009, 2015; Butler & Athanasiou, 2013; Butler, Laclau & Zizek, 2000) articulations of “constant cultural translation.” Borrowing from and extending Homi Bhabha’s theorizing (1994), Butler argues that cultural translation works at both social and cultural limits of particular conceptions of the universal, exposing what and who those conceptions exclude, and simultaneously creating spaces for their reformulations. Butler assumes -- because universality makes its varied and contending appearances in different languages, norms and mores -- that there are differing cultural versions of “we” as well as “the other,” rather than any single transcultural forms. Butler’s goal is a reconfigured and a more fluid and all-embracing form of cultural translation, where "...our fundamental categories can and must be expanded to become more inclusive and more responsive to the full range of cultural populations" (Butler, 2004, p. 223). But as Butler (in Cazier, 2017, n.p.) notes: “we have too often presumed that we must identify with those with whom we ally. But if we insist on identification in this way, we . . . [refuse] to confront those whose views and whose lives may well seem quite different. . . . [A]n expanding coalition has to be one in which we presume that we are not the same.” I extrapolate from Butler’s work possible ways that practices of “constant cultural translation” might aid curriculum researchers in our quests to perform education and its research endeavors, writ large, as embracing, developing and fighting for expansive and inclusive – rather than denigrated, aversive, rejected --versions of “the other.”
Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources: I employ a post-foundational version (Gallop, 2000) of “close reading” of primary texts as a mode of curriculum theorizing that enables “listening closely to the other, and being willing to catch what the other actually says, and able to hear what we didn't expect him [sic] to say” . . . [and of] “reading for ethics, as a means to a more just treatment of others” (pp. 16-17).
Warrant: Especially in these most challenging post-truth times in both the U.S. and worldwide, curricularists must continue to vigorously address threats to all who are deemed the lesser “other,” including the most threatening “outsiders.”
Scholarly Significance: Considering curriculum studies as forms of “cultural translation” may generate crucial perspectives for curriculum researchers committed to the ensuring of multiple differing differences that do not function on assumptions or demands that “we” all be “the same.”

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University