Disquieting Futures: Killing the Present for a Potential Not Yet

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Disquieting Materialities: Foucault and Contemporary Theories in Education

Abstract

In this paper I consider the recent ubiquity of becomings, relations, and entanglements as theoretical terms invoked to communicate a sense of “more” in qualitative inquiry, especially within the field of education. Specifically, I consider these terms as marking futures through a series of necessary exclusions that manifest through enactments of inquiry. In response, I advocate for an ethical orientation that recognizes futures-in-the-making that are never fully open nor completely horizontal. Instead, marked futures are generated through “twisted ontologies” (Nail 2020) that come to matter in ways that others do not. Such it is that we dwell within excluding futures that demand pointed ethical enactments oriented as much to what is left out as to what has yet to become.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, Florida International University