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Session Submission Summary

Highlighted Session: Education in the Era of Interconnectedness and Complexities.

Tue, February 21, 4:45 to 6:15pm EST (4:45 to 6:15pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Declaration Level (1B), Declaration B

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

This panel session is dedicated to analyzing the politics and fall out of conjointitude, contact, flashpoints, tensions, conflicts, perturbations, and clashes, examining how claims to interconnectedness and complexity are forged and perceived, on what basis or contestations of bases, such proclamations are forwarded, and the effects/affects produced. Rather than proffering a universal theory or definition of interconnectedness or complexity, this series is oriented to recognizing and rethinking what is going on when, for example, interconnection is claimed as a reality, is invoked as an explanation, and is blamed or lauded as flashpoints ensue: what differences-in-the-meeting are put in motion, what conditions of possibility and effects of power enable perceived border-crossings, clashes, and negotiations, and what implications, aporia and ethical considerations are embodied and produced in and around educational settings?
The project organizes and facilitates a network of international scholars working with different angles and takes for understandings of interconnection and flashpoint in education and beyond from historical and comparative perspectives.
This panel showcases the work of interdisciplinary research and its thickening around the edges, affirming new efforts that cross between domains such as education, STS, curriculum studies, philosophy, anthropology and more. Because of this interdisciplinary range, educational settings here are broadly conceived. They are not restricted to k-12 schooling, formal educational policies, or classroom settings.
The proposal includes the analysis of: the work with unseen “energy” and how its performance can be narrated by integrative health (CIH) professionals; religious flashpoints through the neologism of the ‘ecological citizen’ exploring how technological, political, economic, and pedagogical discourses on ecological crises are ordered through Judeo-Christian salvific narratives to shape a distinctive way of thinking, living, and acting; cybernetics that while blended with education might reduce the richness of life to codes and programs; the notion of Hongik Ingan as a flashpoint to explore how the American notion of enlightened citizenship has been integrated and transmogrified through the assemblages of the Neo-Confucious thinking that is particular in the Korean contexts.
Traditionally, interconnection is embedded with particularly “Western” philosophical presumptions about Being and subject/object. Such historical and cosmological presumptions make it difficult to discern whether the flashpoints occurring are arising solely within a single system of perception, and if so, which one and on what operational terms? Does the naming and experiencing of flashpoints operate in the form of differences “within” the same system of reasoning or as an encountering of an alterity that cannot be prefigured or “mastered” by an existing system or discourse, or is it something else altogether? This dilemma of perception, classification, discernment and (il)locality is part of what has already been diagnosed, what Jacques Derrida referred to in 1968 as “the problem of our era,” la différance, which remains in operation today. Labile but ultimately limiting sameness/difference and self/other binaries have become indexical of a “Western” hermeneutics of the subject, its allied demographic reasonings and attachments to identity.
As portals of humanist subjectivation self/other and sameness/difference operate in education to continuously generate observational-interpretive templates and corrective strategies around a potent figure of Man – a figure who has overrepresented and stood in for “the human”, generating belief in ontological hierarchies that underpinned the formation of social sciences. In education, more often than not, difference from an unspoken but operationally powerful norm is seen as a problem to be overcome. The different presentations offer a way to name the eruption, that points to a projected difference that perturbates, disrupts, or challenges existing arrangements. Here, the epistemology refers to the recognition of events that are marked by perceived contact around perceived borders—whether configured as geopolitical, disciplinary, demographic, conceptual, etc - flashpoints which expose, incite or embody the aporia and dynamic mutations, the elisions and the hybridities, that put the field, the profession, and the daily practices of education at stake and on notice in new ways.

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