From Strangeness to Speculation: Linguistic Tools Defamiliarizing the Present to Imagine the Future

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Space: A Conversational Laboratory to Explore Speculative Education and Research in the Professions

Abstract

“Let us puncture the present, like a semicolon that breaks a singular moment and offers an
unprecedented addendum; let us dive headlong into chilling, inky deviation.” 1,p.17

Introduction
Those working in speculative education point to the stickiness of our present reality, to the ways
it limits our understanding of the ‘could’s’ and ‘might’s,’ particularly in scholarly realms. 2 Chang
and Philip describe it as an institutional gravity whose pull is difficult—but, critically, not
impossible—to resist. 3 In order for all of us as participants in this session to be able to “dive
headlong into chilling, inky deviation,” we need some tools, some sharpened semicolons that
empower us to break the present moment and frees us to explore unprecedented addenda. 1 The
purpose of this paper is to create these tools by drawing from linguistics, particularly Wodak’s
conceptualization of critical-historical discourse analysis. 4

Theoretical Framework
This paper is grounded in speculative education’s expansiveness, its focus on broadening
horizons, offering possibilities that are not constrained by the current system, practices, or
values. 1 Importantly, this expansiveness is not unilateral; it encourages a “multiversal vision”
[italics theirs], where horizons do not melt into each other, but retain their distinct qualities and
co-exist as potential futures, a multiplicity of potential horizons. 1,p.11 To paint these horizons,
Garcia and Mirra, note that we will need innovative methods.

Modes of Inquiry and Evidence
To heed this call for innovative methods, we draw from critical-historical discourse analysis,
particularly Wodak’s tools of nomination and predication. 4 Nomination examines how people,
objects, phenomena, and processes are placed into categories. For instance, do we talk about
‘students,’ ‘learners,’ ‘trainees,’ or some other term? Predication looks at the processes
associated with various categories. When we describe students-learners-trainees, for example,
what do we say they are (e.g., ‘dedicated,’ ‘behind,’ ‘independent,’ etc.) and what other
processes do we attribute to them beyond being (e.g., ‘studying,’ ‘learning,’ ‘growing,’
‘struggling,’ etc.)? What does our language say about the stories we are currently telling about
our educational spaces and, critically for speculative education, what other stories could we be
telling? Session attendees will be given the opportunity to explore the ways our institutions and
we ourselves nominate and predicate our educational spaces and to play, through some of the
tools of poetic inquiry, 5 with new ways to nominate and predicate in these spaces.

Conclusions and Significance
As with each of these papers in this session, we cannot know the horizons we will imagine nor
the significance these horizons will have, either for our imagined futures or for our lived present.
But we do hope to offer tools for “div[ing] headlong into chilling, inky deviation.” 1

Author

• Abigail W. Konopasky, Dartmouth College