Becoming Stranger Provocations (Poster 1)

• In Event: Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Abstract

This particular paper consists of four short works and appear in the author order listed above.

Indeterminacy in the Posthuman Classroom: The classroom is an unsettled arrangement of the strange. A more-than-human space of learning, it is a gathering of strangers across (strange) moments of classroom phenomena, neither continuous nor discontinuous, cut through one another a part of the nebulous fabric of the world. The classroom is marked by more than barriers of bureaucratic inhibition; it is asynchronous. The haunting of what is excluded in the arrangement interrupts and (re)turns from within, (re)working what is possible. With indeterminacy as our familiar, arrivants to this space are welcome in their (re)visitation. This provocation urges the responsibility of understanding strangeness in a posthuman (social studies) classroom through grid poetry. Offered here as representations of such a responsibility, grid poetry embodies (un)invited intimacies and indeterminacies of a more-than-human learning space. Although the words in the grid poems do belong together, they do not simulate lyric poetry or present a narrative.

Mattering the research process in education: This artistic provocation offers a creative approach on the research process in education through exploration of emerging questions and conditions, performing entities, materials, bodies, meanings, spaces and intervals. There is an invitation to approach educational space as research process—matter in creation, of assemblages and affective resonance, as performative, experiential acts. Some of them include attuning to the research experience, material environment, rhythm the research, sensorial elements and technological interfaces. Research is a thought in the motion, materiality in a form of process.

Unsettling the ‘Social’ in Social Studies: What counts as the ‘social’ in social studies? The ‘social’ is often an uninterrogated reference to how humans are relating to each other from the standpoint of Enlightenment humanism. An over-reliance on humanism has led to the ‘social’ of social studies excluding humans who partake in ways of knowing beyond the rational as well as non-human, unhuman, and inhuman entities. In social studies education, this phenomenon can be described in curriculum (e.g., history of colonization, genocide education) and perpetuated in the classroom (e.g., emphasizing only expressions of rational epistemologies). Instead, how might we include more enmeshed understandings?

Following For the Community: Looking inside the word society reveals its internal logic as well as the potential for alternative development: according to the online etymological dictionary (Harper, 2022), the word society derives from the verb to follow. The definition of the word from the 17th century summarizes the trajectory of the meaning and its potential: typically, people bound by neighborhood and aware of living together in the organized community (Harper, 2022). Being aware of who/what constitutes a neighbor seems to be central for whom/what you recognize as a neighbor; in other words, who we “see” as neighbor, (i.e., other humans) determines who is included in an organized community/society. This provocation is an initial but essential step towards such decentering.

Authors

• Jelena Aleksic
  Presenting Author

• Cathryn van Kessel, Texas Christian University
  Presenting Author

• Polina Golovátina-Mora, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana
  Presenting Author