Diffracting Difference and Disassembling Identity

• In Event: Refusing Curriculum Systemizations: Immeasurable Difference, Indeterminacies, and Multiplicities

Abstract

Purposes: Since the nineteenth century, statistical study of populations has generated new ways of ‘making up people’ by forming categories around individuals which in turn, help form those people themselves (Hacking, 1986, p. 228). Amidst school improvement/accountability practices in K-12 public schools in the United States, statistics-informed classification systems are deployed to help form school subjects, as individuals get sorted and reclassified in ways that separate them from their “immediate historical situation” (Popkewitz, 1997, p. 26). Against this backdrop, in this paper I work to disassemble categorical understandings of difference by problematizing some ways the White woman teacher/Black male student “mismatch” (Takei & Shouse, 2007; Grant & Gibson, 2011) is conceptualized in mainstream education.

Theoretical Framework and Mode of Inquiry: By diffracting White/female and Black/male relationalities through three, diversely situated, contemporary works of visual art, I engage with the ways these artistic renderings of the oftentimes unstable and provocative entanglements of mismatched subjectivities in contemporary schools/society might be interpreted and articulated through post-humanist theoretical lenses. By deploying Haraway’s (1997) and Barad’s (2014) notions of diffraction as a concept and post-qualitative research practice, I engage with multiple, theoretical and methodological perspectives as a way “to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s” (Kaiser and Thiele, 2014, p. 165) .
Thus, building on the assumption that the mismatch is a complex, material and discursive subject/object of study, this engagement with contemporary art explores the knottiness of the discursive practices and materialities that contribute to both the obdurateness of essentialized identity categories and to their disassemblings. With this intention, I engage with new materialist and poststructural thinkers in order to articulate and map:
• the complex relationships amongst racialized and gendered subjectivities in contemporary U.S school;
• our representative practices of these subjectivities; and
• the ways that artistic creativity might diffract relationships amongst language, its role in representation, and knowledge (Barrett & Bolt, 2013, p. xii).
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
Thinking with Barad’s notion of the researcher as part of the material-discursive phenomena studied, this paper engages with post-qualitative research which assumes that the researcher does not merely observe the world, gather empirical data, and represent this “found” data, but rather the researcher is part of the apparatus and thus is part of the becoming and worlding that occurs via research practices. From this perspective, “data” is art, memories, history, paint, postcards, etc.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
This paper contributes to an emergent body of work that assumes that material bodies “do not pre-exist as such but rather materialize together with their particular boundaries always through mapping practices” (Haraway, 1991, p. 201). Thus, contemporary accountability systems fail to account for the complexity of racialized and gendered subjectivities in schools.

Scholarly Significance: By re-conceptualizing and articulating White woman teacher and Black male student connectivities and relationalities as existing within constantly changing material/discursive fields, I work against efforts to systematically “represent” the mismatch as a categorically defined concept in schools and in contemporary education research.

Author

• Mary Newbery, Quinnipiac University