Diffracting Autobiography: Curriculum Researching as Re-Turnings

• In Event: Curriculum Matters and Matterings: Reimagining Research Methodologies

Abstract

Purposes
Historically, curriculum studies in the US primarily embraced technical rationality, efficiency, and more recently, the measurements that abound in audit-culture versions of “accountability” (Taubman, 2009). But the past five decades also have included curriculum theorizings that attend to one’s interpretations of relations between academic knowledge and one’s life history (Pinar & Grumet, 1976). Autobiography, as traditionally conceived, has been and remains the primary mode of such attendings.
Simultaneously, however, “post” theories have greatly challenged Enlightenment notions of humans as autonomous and coherent, whose memories supposedly are both accessible and reliable. Curriculum researchers thus are urged to consider autobiographical methodologies that assume the subject as irreducibly multiple and continually re-constituted through relational entanglings with an other. Re-turning to autobiography that employs diffraction as a generative methodology indeed could further enhance curriculum researchers’ attention to “difference.”

Theoretical Frameworks
In diffracting autobiography as a curriculum methodology beyond the bounds of a knowing and know-able “self,” I employ insights from several feminist philosophers, including philosopher of science Donna Haraway (1997). Haraway’s “diffraction” affirms how interference patterns make a difference in how meanings are made and lived. Haraway’s diffraction and thinking diffractively - in contrast to the modern tool and optics of reflection - is attentive not only to how differences are produced in the world, but also to how these differences leave concrete, material marks on bodies, things, and environments.
Philosopher-physicist Karen Barad’s provocative concept of diffraction involves re-turning, but “not by returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again - iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities . . . , new diffraction patterns” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Barad, alongside Haraway, posits “response-ability” as requisite in diffracting – that is, reading insights through one another to illuminate differences as they emerge, to attend to which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom.
In arguing for diffracting autobiography in curriculum inquiries, I also incorporate Judith Butler’s philosophizing about relationalities, difference and situations of precarity: “Vulnerability is not just the condition of being potentially harmed by another. It names the porous and interdependent character of our bodily and social lives” (Butler, 2021, n.p.). Butler’s emphases on the porous and yet interdependent nature of the subject rejects any hint of communitarianism that returns us to the familiar, to fixed notions of identity and the ideal, sovereign self –– a rejection, then, of any version of “autobiography” as supposedly always fully aware and accurate ruminations on one’s past and present experiences of and with difference.

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources
I employ differing post-foundational feminist scholars’ conceptualizations as “data” that diffract autobiography’s multiplicities, indeterminacies and relationalities.

Significance
“Diffracting autobiography” supports curriculum studies researchers who desire to complicate humanist, ethnocentric and anthropocentric underpinnings of both curriculum and autobiography. Scholarly significances of such may be realized in the burgeoning of relationalities that support curriculum studies as primarily focused on issues of “difference,” writ large.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author