Opaque Reciprocity: Glissant’s “Right to Opacity” as a Communication and Language Praxis in Education

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Rights, Resistance, Impact: Resisting Hegemony in Curriculum Studies (Table 39)

Abstract

In this paper, the authors argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the “right to opacity” in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE). We draw from Glissant’s writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of ‘opacity’ and ‘transparency,’ to consider two vignettes from research conducted in two ECE settings in England: a special education classroom and a nursery. We contest the international emphasis on efficiency, clarity, and rationality in ECE communication and language provision as one informed by colonial logics of ‘transparency.’ Instead, we argue for an attention to moments of what we call “opaque reciprocity:” of non-dyadic, non-developmentalist, more-than-human exchange, within which authorship and intentionality become distributed inter-subjectively, thereby de-emphasising transparent notions of meaning-making.

Authors

• David Ben Shannon, University of Sheffield

• Abigail Hackett, Sheffield Hallam University