Toward Historicized Grammars of Educational Accountability: Reckoning with Historical Trauma, Memory, Debt and the Reparative

• In Event: Disruptive Historicizing and Futurity in Curriculum Theorizing

Abstract

That our present is characterized by a through-line sensation of crisis is without question. It is one with intersectionally racialized and violent conjunctures which were in effect prior to the results of the November 2024 elections or the January 2025 presidential inauguration. Therefore, it is not a “state of exception but rather … a steady state,” in Hortense Spillers’ conceptualization, and registers as a conundrum over the materiality and implicatedness of historical memory. This paper seeks to reckon with naming and breaking with logics of forgetting, and coming to accountability for suppressed histories, their afterlives, logics, and legacies, by opening up and putting pressure on curricular and pedagogical structures, along with their socio-political “grammarian” roles, in Sylvia Wynter’s terms.

Author

• Grace A. Livingston, University of Puget Sound