Black Studies and Posthuman Schooling: A Deep Listening Session With Black Youth Narratives

• In Event: Educational Research at the Intersection of Contemporary Black Studies and Posthumanism: Risks, Possibilities, and Purpose

Abstract

1. Purposes: This paper examines the use of contemporary Black studies theory and posthumanist philosophies in research in the area of curriculum studies. Specifically, it looks at the tensions involved in drawing on both frameworks and what working at this confluence of theories makes possible in curriculum studies and curriculum theorizing.
2. Theoretical frameworks: Drawing from scholars across African American intellectual traditions (e.g., Bethune, 1938; Cooper, 1892; Truth, 1851), as they intersect with those whose scholarship attends to posthuman philosophies (e.g., Braidotti, 2022; Burton, 2017; Lillvis, 2017; Weheliye, 2002), this paper argues that an attention to curriculum theorizing can be a significant inroad to consider how Black studies and posthuman philosophies can interrupt forms of dehumanization in schools. Specifically, these theoretical frameworks are used to at once explore what scholars like Lillvis (2017) discuss as the liminality of Black women and girls’ voices, perspectives, citizenship, and being in schools and communities, while considering how these frameworks might interrupt the wake of violence (Sharpe, 2016) engendered and maintained through pervasive white supremacist curricula.
3-4. Modes of inquiry and data sources: Inquiry for this paper is developed using two data sets that emerged from separate yet related sonic ethnographic (Gershon, 2017) studies. The sonic ethnographic approach used in both studies is significant because, following Weheliye’s (2002) discussion on technologies in Black popular music and their relationship with posthuman dialogues, recording devices through sonic ethnography can be understood as an inherently posthuman form of qualitative research.
5. Substantiated conclusions: Similar to Braidotti’s (2022) dialogue on normalizing post-Vitruvian ideals, one way to think through these sonic ethnographic studies is to use curriculum theorizing as it is nested and layered with Black studies and posthuman philosophies. This is significant because the confluence of these frameworks enables the reconsideration of questions about dehumanization across curricula and within Black studies and posthuman philosophies themselves. As Lillvis (2017) explores, when posthuman philosophies blur the boundaries of human-ness, the complexities of being and their relationships emerge. This can also be used as a form of erasure for Black experiences and ontoepistemologies (Jackson, 2020). Rather than a “conclusion,” the analysis of this work is an attention to this tension and a consideration of how posthuman philosophies and Black studies can be used within curriculum theorizing to think about how such erasures happen every day in schools.
6. Scholarly significance of the work: The very blurring of lines that is inherent to posthuman philosophies, and the clarity of other lines that can be endemic in Black studies, is expressed in careful, and delicate theoretical work. This is significant when applied to how this kind of work is not only expressed in schools but could be leveraged to interrupt normalized practices of dehumanization that were constant and consistent in both studies.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington
  Presenting Author