Posthuman grief and mourning as radical (?) temporal curricula

• In Event: Reimagining Curriculum Through Posthuman and Dialogic Ethics

Abstract

A discussion of grief and mourning as radical curricula invite us to the roots of grief in the present moment: roots in settler colonial, white supremacist, ableist, cishet-gendered violence that extend far beyond the human. This paper asks how and whether conceptualizing grief and mourning, and the mourning subject, in posthuman, temporally non-linear, and “molecular” (Lykke, 2023) terms can teach us to form more radical circles of kinship that subvert and resist settler colonialism both in our scholarly praxes and in our relations to each other, the land, and the settler state. The paper draws on the author’s previous work concerning citational politics and work in posthumanisms and settler colonial and Indigenous scholarship to trouble linear, “progressive time” (Springgay & Truman, 2019) and its attendant notions of grieving and mourning. It examines the curricular and cultural work of grief and mourning in a simultaneously death-driven and death-denialist settler colonial society.

Author

• MaryJohn R Pachuta-Rysak, Grand Valley State University