When Fascism Comes: The Biopolitics of Education Policy in Florida and Beyond

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Four
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Legislation and Policy (Table 1)

Abstract

Current ideological attacks on public K-12 and higher education necessitate curriculum inquiry that historicizes the problems of the present and engages critically with the authoritarian truth claims that currently dominate education legislation and policy. This paper is a curriculum inquiry into recent legislation and policy in the state of Florida, which, the author argues, have been operationalized through the deployment of historically fascistic tropes. Those tropes comport with biopolitics that have slid into what Foucault called a death function that seeks to disidentify as citizens many based on racial and sexual difference. The paper also theorizes a reversal of biopolitics as an affirmative biopower based on ethics of truth telling in which curriculum theorists embody the search for truth.

Author

• James P. Burns, Florida International University
  Presenting Author