Curriculum Tangles: Theorizing With Alterity

• In Event: Tangles of Difference: Transnational and Transgenerational Curriculum Relationalities

Abstract

Purpose: Our focus is on a version of curriculum theory that is understood as a normative discourse. Such a discourse delimits what can be meant as curriculum and which, to a certain extent, “define[s] cultural intelligibility, regulate[s] the distribution of vulnerability” (Butler & Anastasiou, 2013, p. 2), and throws people into zones of abjection. Here, we enact our deconstructive desire in relation to curriculum theorizations that block the circulation of difference.

Theoretical framework and modes of inquiry: We take the curriculum field as a retro-active production, an agential cut (Barad, 2010) or a razor cut (Haddock-Lobo, 2021) in the entanglement of material-texts in circulation. This cut does not produce presence, but only the possibility of new deferrals and the metaphysical desire to contain them. Such desire has materialized, countless times, in a theory-presence that intends to absolutely define what curriculum studies “are.” Such a rigid definition makes “curriculum” itself inhospitable to the call of otherness.
Our study is eminently theoretical, although we do not refuse to acknowledge “empirical materials,” constituted of complexes of material-texts that circulate in the world. We read these via Derrida's (1997) economy of the trace, which implies the refusal of the hermeneutic promise of understanding. Assuming a post-structural/new materialist inflected perspective, we take these complexes as dissemination of marks that cannot ever be repeated. Operating a diffractive reading of an entanglement of material-texts (Barad, 2010) coming from different “traditions,” we seek to produce a theorization committed to displace “schemes of intelligibility that register as assaultive” (Butler & Anastasiou, 2013, p.80).

Warrants for arguments: Our curriculum theorization is not to be understood as something totally new or outside the world that is there, but rather, as something that has been “existing for a long time, [but] has not [been mostly] admitted in the terms that govern reality” (Butler, 2004, p. 31). In this sense, our theorizing intends to be responsive to the struggles for recognition and subjectivity and to the entanglements of claims-materials that they produce. It inherits, as a task, the spirit of curriculum reconceptualization in its refusal of “right ways” of making curriculum. We argue that a curriculum theory committed to difference has to do more than be inclusive of identity demands and its claims. Here we present a theorization that emerges from the agential cut of the world’s texts-materialities – black, indigenous, LGBTQIA+, nationals, women -- among many others to which naming, and enumeration do not do justice. Such an exercise is possibly best undertaken via collaborative work among teachers, transnational and transgenerational curricularists, social activists, and diverse community members.

Scholarly significance of the study: If theoretical discourse has agency (Butler, 2015), it is essential to continue interrogating its coercive domain. We also wish to impact the domains of practice and curriculum policy. Our most desired impact resides in the production and circulation of a curricular theorization that resonates in schools and in curricular policies, thus facilitating the emergence and support of diverse forms of subjectivies and ways of being in the world.

Authors

• Elizabeth Macedo, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University