Slow Death: The Affective Curriculum of Active Shooter Drills

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: From Subservience to Strength: Discourse, Resistance, and the Future of Teacher Education (Table 3)

Abstract

School shootings continue to dominate headlines, and with them a new staple of American student experience: the active shooter drill. As curriculum scholars, we wonder what these drills teach and what happens to bodies during these events. Drawing from Berlant’s (2007) notion of “slow death” and Puar’s (2015) work on “debility”, we find that such drills both debilitate—provide students with an ongoing and wearying experience of crisis, i.e., slow death—and afford their own disruption, opening curricular spaces for bodies to resist control in surprising ways. This work complicates work on school shootings, suggesting instead that a weak, affective theory can describe the complexities faced by bodies working to get by in US schools today.

Authors

• Scott Jarvie, San Jose State University

• Erica Eva Colmenares, San Jose State University