On Unknowability and Representations: Is Gandhi Good Enough for a Future of Nonviolence in Curriculum Studies?

• In Event: Theorizing Nonviolence and Peace in Curriculum Studies: International Conversations on Interdependence in a Worldwide Pandemic

Abstract

In the early morning hours of January 27, 2021, a 6-ft tall, 650-pound bronze statue of Gandhi, in the Central Park of the City of Davis in Northern California, was sawed off at the ankles and half its face was severed and missing. Seven months before, in June 2020, the city council of Leicester, England ruled a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, erected in 2009, would not be removed from a town square after a petition had received over 6,000 signatures. A statue of Gandhi at the University of Ghana was eventually pulled down in 2018; petitions and protests for its removal that started almost immediately after it was erected in 2016. How is it possible that a man described by Albert Einstein as so glorious that “generations … will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever … walked upon this earth” could invite such anger and violence? (Chatfield, 1976). This paper focuses on the question of unknowability in how to respond to the tensions between Gandhi as sinner and saint and asks if a good enough Gandhi is possible in the move forward for nonviolence and peace studies in curriculum studies.

Feminist pedagogues are best known for their work in unknowability. Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) spoke to the differences between students and teachers in terms of power and social identities. She noted that her own teaching experiences made her want to confront unknowability, that knowledges are situated, partial, in conflict and ultimately irreducible. She was interested in teaching practices that could account for and be “grounded in the unknowable” (p.323). Patti Lather (2006) has worked at the limits of knowability, focused on where attempts to know subvert themselves as a part of the process (p. 38). Much of Lather’s work has focused on the illusion of mastery, on what’s left out or beyond knowing given the difficult and incomplete nature of efforts to represent. Elizabeth St. Pierre (2014), in a similar fashion, has focused on the unraveling of the subject in educational research and what has transgressed or is beyond knowability in inquiry processes. More recent work in unknowability in education can be found in the work of Burdick and Sandlin (2013), who question the work done under the banner of public pedagogy. For them, the ambivalent meaning attached to public pedagogy is not an incitement to study limits but a question of how to “shore up the vast gaps that currently underlie public pedagogy” (p. 142). From all this work, this paper addressees the question of what can be known and is beyond knowing in conceptualizing Gandhi as a curricularist. This paper also addresses what it might mean to work at the crossroads of representations that invite violence and Gandhi’s ideas focused on a quite sophisticated understanding of truth, self-suffering, and love as a sort of journey to peace.

This paper ends with a proposition stated as a question, is there a good enough Gandhi that might be workable for a future of nonviolence in curriculum studies?

Author

• Erik L. Malewski, Kennesaw State University