Beyond Risk and Safety: Toward a Fanonian Theory of Pedagogical Ungovernability

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Assemblages, Realities And Tensions In Decolonizing Education

Abstract

This paper critiques dominant educational framings of “safety” and “risk” in race and gender dialogue. Drawing from Fanon’s theory of psychic capture and Salamon’s work on comportment, it argues that Leonardo and Porter’s (2010) call to move white students into “risk” still centers whiteness as the pedagogical subject. Trans and racialized students do not enter risk—they are already governed by it. Through theoretical analysis and case examples, the paper explores how institutional inclusion operates as containment. Rather than pursuing safer dialogue, it calls for pedagogies rooted in refusal and ungovernability as decolonial praxis.

Author

• Omi Salas-SantaCruz, University of Utah