“Autonomous Self” as Remedy for Taiwan's Democracy in the Citizen Formation in Taiwanese Curriculum Reforms

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Inquiries Into the Curricular and Narrativized Self (Table 11)

Abstract

“Autonomous self”—formulated as a trained civic competence—emerges as a remedy for deregulation of subjectivity in a democratic society in Taiwan’s 1990’s curriculum reforms. It becomes a new norm (i.e., self-knowledge) concerning the subjectivity of the “future citizen.” Configurations of “autonomous self” exist, nevertheless, with privileged judgments, unfamiliar cultural practices, and unsettling political conflicts. “Autonomous self”—intermingled with social-scientific reasoning—is regulated as a singular human experience of freedom that contracts with the previous Confucian no-self curriculum, and unsettles Sinicized unification vs. Taiwan independence disputes. The paper criticizes “autonomous self” through unraveling its historical, cultural, and political configurations that objectify “future citizen” as an obligated research object, imposing upon the citizen norms of political consciousness instrumental to Taiwan independence.

Author

• Kai-Jung Hsiao, University of Wisconsin - Madison