Historical Ontology and Critical Inquiry: A Historical-Material Analysis of School Shootings and Student Activism

• In Event: 47.097 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Eight - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 47.097-8 - Truth-Telling in Contemporary Events

Abstract

This paper engages Foucault’s concept of “historical ontology” to both critique and extend new materialist scholarship as a form of critical inquiry. The “material turn” in the social sciences indicates how the everyday is entangled with objects, spaces, and places, or the non-human material environment of schools. However, material analyses may fall short when not accompanied by a historical ontology which contextualizes practices and material processes within the historical present. To apply this argument, I turn to the events of the Parkland, Florida shooting and, importantly, the subsequent activism on the part of students to illustrate the important intersections between materiality and history within critical questions about education.

Author

• Austin James Pickup, Aurora University