The Journal as Entanglement: Intersectional Inquiry on 20 Years of Curriculum Theorizing

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Histories in Practice: Revisioning Time, Space, and Place (Table 20)

Abstract

The period of 2000 to 2020 in curriculum studies witnessed an important series of critiques related to race and the field of curriculum studies as well as new theoretical contributions that sought to disrupt dominant notions of history/ies and temporal and spatial onto-epistemologies. Emergent scholars of color and critical white allies pushed back on the historical whiteness of the curriculum field and opened up new avenues for critical work in curriculum theorizing. These important interventions challenged scholars in varied ways—expanding to other areas of inquiry and exposing other biases—and those tensions, trajectories, and attendant entanglements are reflected in the pages of JCT. This paper discusses the forthcoming volume Twenty Years of Curriculum Theorizing: JCT, 2000-2020 and foregrounds those challenges, reflections, and the move toward a much more intersectional analysis, adhering to the foundational understanding established by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) centering multiple and intersecting identities subjected to oppression. This paper highlights emerging scholars who have responded to the collection and point to future directions; some of the notable new directions include: Critical Race Feminism, postcolonial/decolonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, affect theory, New Materialism/posthumanism, and Critical Disability Theory.
The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) has played a foundational role in the field of curriculum studies since the paradigm shift in the 1970s, known as the Reconceptualization (Pinar, 2000). Editorial teams over the years sponsored an annual conference where that reconceptualization of U.S. curriculum studies was nurtured, expanded, and critiqued (Huddleston & Helfenbein, 2020). In 1999 a collection edited by Bill Pinar compiled together "the best" of JCT articles from the years, plus historical material related to the scholarship and organization of what had become something of an intellectual movement. This new volume tracing the years 2000-2020 intends to add to (and trouble) that historical and intellectual project of tracking the trajectories of the field both new and expansive.
While a simple purpose of this volume is to replicate the 1999 project and curate a collection of articles from the last twenty years of JCT, our intention is to also put curriculum scholars in conversation with those articles. The framing chapters are intended to place the articles selected both within a scholarly, historical context and in relation to future directions of the field. These invited chapters are more than review or simple prefatory material and, as an intellectual engagement/entanglement, provide a unique aspect to this volume that highlights a contested, messy, and negotiated curriculum history.

Author

• Robert J. Helfenbein, Mercer University