(The Ontology of the Parenthetical)

• In Event: Thinking With the Parenthetical, the Palimpsest, and the Practical: When Curriculum Studies Meets Disability Studies

Abstract

(In keeping with the tone of this proposal (as per the parenthetical), the format of this proposal will attempt rather unsuccessfully to meet the parameters set out in the CFP)

Preamble:
Three scholars decide to edit a special issue of a journal on disability and curriculum. And now they are committed to write the introductory essay to the special issue. The senior scholar offers to write about the theoretical. The junior scholar lays claim to the scholarship of practice. The independent scholar pauses listening carefully and then writes:
I was thinking that your (senior scholar) work is exciting because it is deeply theoretical, and theory excites me.
And the junior scholar was saying that her work is practical because it relates to practice, and that is exciting because it is real.
So, then I think, well now, what do I contribute?
So: I make things up poetically (which is like hyper theory), and am actually disabled (regarding disability, what could be realer?).
In this way I am to the outer edges of each thing, like parentheses, hugging.
Edgy, out there, but embracing.

Here is a visual:

(theory practice)
(Is the left parenthesis poetry and the right parenthesis being?)
(I am hugging the senior scholar and the junior scholars mentally, above, also)

We do want theory and practice to be together in a more emphatic way.
Maybe in order for that to happen, we have decided to de-marginalize the parenthetical.

A favorite quote:
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
This may have been said by either Albert Einstein or Yogi Berra, but probably wasn’t.

Added parenthetical: (In reality, theory and practice need each other, and/or make each other more interesting.)

Parentheses are to theses what meta-curriculum is to curriculum.

Objectives/Perspectives/Modes of Inquiry/Scholarly Significance:
(My purpose as a parenthetical person in the symposium — etymologically “put in beside” the senior and junior scholars but ontologically in this case embracing them — is to examine what curriculum can mean when “meta” is understood both historically and in the way of meaning-in-use. The term “meta-curriculum” was invented for the purposes of this work in order to get at a new orientation to disability which may be relationally transformative in education. The mode of inquiry in this section is playful and interactive, philosophical and personal, with the warrant of the erstwhile professor/practitioner situated in a disabled bodymind. As a site of inquiry, such an epistemic standpoint is significant as it can bring together the theoretical and the data-based practical by radically bracketing the margins.)

Author

• Elizabeth J. Grace, Grace Advocacy