The Unthought of Racism: Putting New Materialism to Work in Curriculum Studies

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Posthumanist Theory in the Service of Antiracist Curriculum Studies Scholarship

Abstract

Objective: This paper brings new theoretical literatures to bear on the topic of race, racism, and institutionalized racial oppression as it is addressed in the field of curriculum studies.

Theoretical Framework: This paper puts the recent work of N. Katherine Hayles (2017) into conversation with new critical geographies that take seriously questions of race and intersectionality (McKittrick, 2006; Wynter, 2001), political economy (Ford, 2017; Bennett, 2010), and scale (Authors, 2017). Hayles’ recent work considers contemporary discoveries in neuroscience in relation to various social theories, including the current grouping of scholarship referred to as New Materialism. She offers that what is asked of us in the new materialism is to consider spaces as filled with things possessed of agency or “thing-power” as Jane Bennett would call it. We are asked to hear “the call of things.” But what is most important in this rethinking, according to Hayles, is not thinking of parts of the larger whole of meaning making but rather to consider the ways in which the human and the non-human are entangled or, following Karen Barad (2010), that “there is less an assemblage of agents that there is an entangled state of agencies” (p.23).

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources: Using this literature, this paper offers a conceptual intervention into treatment of race, racism, and the hidden curriculum of white supremacy in public schools. Data sources are the treatment of these topics in the existing curriculum scholarship. Given Hayles’ (2010) previous work, most notably in posthumanism, this paper discusses various aspects of her work in relation to curriculum theory’s recent consideration of both post-humanism and new materialism (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016; Snaza & Weaver, 2015; Weaver, 2010).

Substantiated Conclusions: At its core, Hayles’ work attempts to reconfigure how we consider both human cognition and its place within larger systems. Hayles writes:

There is thought, but before it is unthought: a mode of interacting with the world enmeshed in the “eternal present” that forever eludes the bleated grasp of consciousness. “Unthought” may also be taken to refer to recent discoveries in neuroscience confirming the existence of nonconscious cognitive processes inaccessible to conscious introspection but nevertheless essential for consciousness to function. (p. 1)

This paper will unpack the implications of this neurobiological and philosophical conception of the “unthought” for the concept of hidden curriculum in schools, as well as for concepts of implicit racial bias and the circulation of white supremacist and anti-Black ideologies in schools.

Scholarly Significance: Science and technology advances at a startling pace and threatens to outstrip our ability to recognize and respond to manifestations of racism in schools and in society at large. Hayles argues that social theorists and humanities scholars needs to invest in becoming the ethical voice that questions technological advancements as a means of directing them away from things like racism, oppression, and discrimination. This paper extends that argument to the “complicated conversation” of curriculum scholars (Kincheloe, 1991; Pinar, 2004, 2012; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2008).

Author

• Robert James Helfenbein, Mercer University