Cishetero Sucker Punches: Educational Necropolitics, Consent, and Sonic Possibilities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Sound Studies for Remedy and Repair in Education and Education Research (Table 7)

Abstract

How, to what, and with whom people engage in listening practices across educational contexts tends to be rather limited (Gershon, 2023; Noguera, 2007). Ideas and ideals that are central to whose voices and perspectives are heard are often steeped in cishetero, patriarchal norms that are nested within whiteness (Truman & Ben Shannon, 2018). Practically speaking, this means that queer youth are often left un-heard throughout educational contexts—from the curricula they learn across classrooms, corridors, and community spaces (Metz, 1978), to the broader policies made at local, state, and national levels that can create harmful sociopolitical conditions for queer youth and queer communities.
The purpose of this paper is to theorize how critical consent curricula can be layered and used as one way to interrupt educational necropolitics (Author 2021). By educational necropolitics, I mean the many ways that schools—and those who participate in them—decide whose ways of being, knowing, and doing can survive and thrive in schools and whose ontoepistemologies will be choked away and, possibly, murdered through systems of schooling. Leaning heavily on the work of scholars like Achille Mbembe (2019), Bettina Love (2019), Carter G. Woodson (1933) who have deeply theorized questions of violence to the point of causing a person harm, educational necropolitics places this harm through school-based curricula. While there have been longstanding intellectual dialogues that consider the many ways to interrupt this violence, here I am suggesting that critical consent curricula provide points of resistance and refusal that are meant to complement these dialogues. By critical consent curricula I mean the many ways that schools teach and, often, ignore, questions of consent in ways that amount to sociopolitical and cultural norms that align with these lessons.
The theoretical groundings for this work reside in the fields of curriculum studies and, to consider deep listening through sonic ethnography, sound studies. There is no place where learning does not occur. As such, the politics of learning—what is learned, by whom, and how—is important. Rather than limited inclusion of the formal curriculum, critical consent curricula attend to multiplicity within educational contexts. Layering in sound studies, this means that learning happens even in moments of silence. Listening deeply across contexts is therefore a critical skill for anyone involved in educational systems to cultivate.
This paper serves as a set of calls: First, this is a call for consent to be foregrounded across educational contexts. Second, this implores teacher preparation programs to attend to the impacts of educational necropolitics in classrooms. Finally, this paper suggests a greater emphasis on the possibilities within sonic approaches to research and schools. The underlying reason for this call does not feel radical, though perhaps, for some, it is. My desire is that this call is answered by educators across spaces to ensure that queer youth can be themselves, unapologetically, across all spaces but, especially, in schools. This is especially significant as queer youth across identities continue to be aurally sucker punched through echo chambers of oppression that reverberate in schools.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington