School as a Landscape Structure in the Plantationocene

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Theoretical Frameworks for Hope, Crisis, and Transformation

Abstract

At the center of what critical theorists call a "conjunctural crisis" affecting people globally and unevenly (Gramsci et al., 1992; Hall & Massey, 2010), the school is currently a site of contestation for how people should live, be supported, or be erased. At the same time, the school cannot immediately shift its daily operation and relationships that bolster and maintain the conditions that make these conditions possible in the first place. To better attend to overlapping issues, this paper applies anthropological, geological, and archaeological terms from outside the field of education to argue for a "both, and" approach to a grieveable death of school (Marie and Watson, 2021), and current struggles at it to build our capacities for something else.

Author

• Erik Elshire, University of Illinois at Chicago