Curriculum, Collaborations, and Imperative Relationalities

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

Abstract

Purposes:
This paper posits that responses to the 2022 Call for “new ways of working . . . collaboratively across multiple disciplines and boundaries,” and the measuring of “the impact of our work” require that we “stay with the trouble of the present,” which Haraway (2016) warns is the living and dying together on a damaged earth ravaged by climate changes.

Utilizing “stay with the trouble of the present” as a mode of inquiry, I focus on several less urgent but persisting curriculum studies issues: 1) neo-positivist emphases on measurement; 2) and on assumptions of an autonomous “self” engaging in collaborative curriculum projects conceived as always-synchronous and welcoming-of-difference engagements wherein educators/researchers successfully work across multiply positioned boundaries. I stay with these troubles by contrasting these assumptions with varied feminist scholars who agree that “to be one is always to become with many” – wherein “becoming recasts being as an active and constant state of relationality” (Haraway, 2007, p. 4).

Perspective(s)/ theoretical framework(s)
I draw from several highly influential post-foundational feminist theorists (differently) following Haraway, who persistently asks: “How to flourish together in difference without the telos of a final peace?” (Haraway, 2007, p. 301). She responds that relationalities are the preconditions of collective actions that offer no guarantees, but that can function as invitations to unexpected collaborations (Haraway, 2016).

Braidotti’s (2013) “posthuman” requires thinking not only about the nature(s) of human subjectivity, but also about ideas of mutual inter-dependences and productive mergers of forces that can teach us to think differently about our “selves.” Positing animated networks of relationalities, Braidotti urges inclusive ethical frameworks “that can attend to the non-human agents at work in collaboration with our own human activities” (2018, p. 293).

Barad’s (2007) agential realism is a material practice of being in touch with and inseparable from specific phenomena being investigated. Further, “sense-making is never an individual affair, nor does it happen once and for all through proclamation . . . . It is always iterative and collaborative. And indeed, tracing the sedimented/sedimenting historicities of matter/ing in their entanglement requires collaboration (and not only among humans),” (Barad with Gandorfer, 2021, p. 28).

Butler’s (2015a, 2015b) “ethics of relationality” theorizes an ontology of the subject conceived as entailing material and discursive components that cannot be isolated and analyzed apart from the others. Butler argues that engagement with an “other,” whether discursively and materially positioned as the same or as different -- as liminal, monstrous, non-human, in-human, an inert thing, precarious -- is that which ushers subjectivities and relationalities into being.

Modes of inquiry & Data Sources
I employ these differing post-foundational feminist scholars’ conceptualizations as “data” that encourage new and varied theorizings of curriculum, collaborations and assessments that welcome multiplicities and indeterminacies of subjectivities and relationalities.

Significance
“Staying with the trouble” supports curriculum studies participants desiring to interrogate and/or shed humanist, ethnocentric and anthropocentric underpinnings of curriculum, collaboration and assessment in order to theorize relational ontologies that buoy boundless and currently imperative connectivities.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University