Seeing the Cyborg: Using Speculative Fiction as Member Checking and Data Making

• In Event: Decolonizing Magic as Research Method, Narrative Practice, and Instructional Design

Abstract

Teachers at no-excuse charter schools are often expected to enforce and follow policies and practices that are anti-Black and dehumanizing, typically in the name of high academic achievement (Dishon & Goodman, 2017; Sondel, Kretchmar & Dunn, 2019; Golann, 2021). In a multiple case study of seven teachers at no-excuse charter schools, following these expectations forces teachers to contradict their beliefs about education, contributing to affective tension and a deep sense of melancholy (Author, in progress). Affective tensions can be difficult to describe and therefore reflexively discuss with participants. This paper explores how speculative fiction represents these teachers’ affective tensions, serving as a data collection method and a member check.

This paper grows from the perspective that teachers in neoliberal learning spaces undergo a process of mechanization (Author, in process), the aim of which is to create obedient teacher “machines”. Mechanized teachers face threats to salary, social standing, and career; repeated exposure to neoliberal narratives as positive; and bodily controls. It is therefore critical to understand how they experience becoming mechanized as arbiters of systemic oppression (Althussar, 2006). Speculative fiction provides the opportunity to materialize affective tensions, which can be difficult to represent, let alone discuss critically. Furthermore, speculative fiction allows us to imagine a world unbound by destructive forces like White Supremacy (Toliver, 2020).

Speculative fiction is one method I use as part of critical storying methodology (Author, in process), which extends from practices in testimonio (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Carmona 2012), testifying to trauma (Felman & Laub, 1992), and restorying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) and counternarrating (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) dominant narratives. Following interviews, observations, and memo-writing, I use critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2018) to examine how participants’ “rebel becomings” (Maclure, Jones, Holmes, & MacRae, 2012) reject, recycle, and/or resist neoliberalism. After coding findings as emergent themes, I wrote each participant as a cyborgian protagonist in a machine dystopia who physically reflects those themes. I shared participants’ stories with each to check my understanding of their experiences, and to engage in critical dialogue.

Cyborg characters served as uncanny representations that sparked reflexive conversations and clarifications. For example, I manifested the theme of “covert resistance” in one cyborg covering the machine eye that had been surgically implanted into her head as she taught a rogue program about life with students before plugging them back into their regularly planned lessons. Representations such as these led to elaborations about teachers’ internal contradictions and melancholy, clarifications about what counts as a “tension”, and examinations of the way neoliberal policies and practices covertly operate at their school.

While exploring teachers’ experiences through speculative fiction cannot undo the very real material harm multiply minoritized students experience as a result of White Supremacy and Neoliberalism, it can offer one more perspective on the way these ideologies operate within no-excuse charter spaces. Reflecting on teachers’ tensions through critical storying and specifically speculative fiction can contribute to 1) naming the specific ways teachers may be dehumanized into perpetuating violence, and 2) creating imaginative spaces for educators to reflect and co-conspire toward change and resistance.

Author

• Bianca Licata, San Francisco State University