Space, Affect and Education: Historicizing the Production of Differences

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Scholarship in comparative and international education (CIE) has increasingly recognized space and affect as important to understanding how onto-epistemic hierarchies of humanness are (re)inscribed in research, policy, and reform as ‘kinds’ of people (Edwards et al., 2023; Popkewitz, 2022; Rappleye & Komatsu, 2016; Saito et al., 2023; Takayama et al., 2017; Tunc, 2024; Zhao et al., 2022). Drawing from postcolonial, historical, and comparative education scholarship attentive to the relationality of space and affect, this panel of historically informed scholars builds upon these interventions, directing critical reflexivity toward taken-for-granted notions of space and affect in CIE. Together, we examine space and affect as forms of power, animating how differences are seen and acted on in education and in society.

While focusing on distinct ‘locales’ (India, Kenya, Mexico, and Puerto Rico), temporal ‘moments’ (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and conceptual ‘problems’ (colonial schools, rural education, utopics, and map-making) the papers collectively trouble the very formulations of these “spacetimes” of education (Seddon et al., 2018), focusing on how particular constructions of space—‘the village,’ the countryside,’ and even ‘nature’ itself—seem to transcend contexts while paradoxically servicing as the basis for contextualization. Kirchgasler analyzes how colonial principles of ‘tutelage’ in Kenya produced an affect-saturated, spatializing ‘force field’ that racialized by assigning Natives to pastoral modes of living and according to a scientific sympathy born from a logic of developmentalism. Miranda Noriega argues that rurality became a biopolitical space of intervention for constructing modern peasant subjectivities in terms of gender and intimacy within the school expansion of post-revolutionary Mexico. Sen explores how the village and the rural landscape served as a site for utopics that contained its own proper sense of time and politics that sought to escape from both colonialist and nationalist projects in India. Finally, Nieves examines the complex interplay of discursive graphic logics and constructions of difference in Puerto Rico’s education curricula and policy at the turn of the twentieth century; and couples that analysis with how current digital cartography projects are re-imagining educational spaces in Puerto Rico.

The papers draw upon an allied set of theoretical and methodological approaches familiar to postcolonial and postfoundational studies, such as historicizing and genealogical methods that approach the archive as a site that records, orders, and stores documents in a logic that reinscribes fears of degradations and desires of progress at the heart of colonial and state projects (Derrida, 1996; Foucault, 1977, 2002; Stoler, 2002, 2010). Rather than examine notions of space and affect as deterministic (i.e., as a natural outcome of modernization or progress), they are instead explored as sites of desire and anxiety (Derrida, 1996; Foucault, 1977, 2002; Stoler, 2002, 2010) that define educated/uneducated subjects, and imbue education with particular affective dimensions, such as sympathy and intimacy, that are hoped to offer antidotes to the fears associated with modernity. Space and affect are thus considered as discursive constructions in relation to other biopolitical projects, constructed and mobilized within systems of ‘reason’ about education and society (Popkewitz et al., 2017), and indissolubly linked to racial, gendered, and classed distinctions necessary for the management and control of desires and emotions of subjugated populations.

The papers’ theoretical and methodological approaches benefit from a diverse array of empirical sources, including maps (physical and digital), student lessons, inspectors’ reports, education policy documents, educational psychology studies, programmatic reform documents, as well as visual culture, including school murals and landscape art. These sources allow the analyzes to ‘unmap’ the network of assumptions, affects, technologies, and discourses that educationalize space and spatialize education. These sources are examined in terms of the rules and principles that organize how differences are seen and acted on as ‘natural.’

The panel’s critical focus on space and affect as producing differences is a means to encourage self-reflexivity towards the concepts, categories, and classifications that often form the unexamined basis of comparative and international education, even as they potentially reinscribe onto-epistemic hierarchies of humanness, whose differences exclude. The papers’ theoretical and methodological approaches seek to reintroduce historical contingency, clearing a space for alternatives. For instance, Kirchgasler’s analysis of tutelary biopolitics highlights how sympathetic developmental practices make representatives of targeted populations into models who articulate developmental norms and values as a theory of change, calling into question this seeming commonsense imperative in development today. Sen’s focus on the collaboration between Rabindranth Tagore and L.K Elmhirst highlights how concerns around rural development, education, and utopia-making converged in the first half of the twentieth century, noting that, in spite of their emergence from colonialism and nationalism, the village and the rural landscape were categories that carried the potential to transcend these conditions. Nieves’s analysis of map-making gestures of policymakers and educators in Puerto Rico under the first years of colonial rule connects with contemporary movements of digital cartography and un/mapping the complex interplay of colonial and governmental rationalities constructing the “spaces” and “topographies” of education. This project goes beyond unraveling the “colonial condition” to demonstrate the intellectual and institutional movements towards decolonial futures in education in Puerto Rico.

Sub Unit

• Post-foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education SIG

Chair

• Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Individual Presentations

• The Biopolitics of Tutelage: Adapted Education and the Jeanes School in Early 20th Century Colonial Kenya - Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Gender, Intimacy and Emotions in the Educational Problematization of Rurality in Post-revolutionary Mexico - Marino Miranda Noriega, UW-Madison

• Un/mapping Educational Spaces in Puerto Rico - Bethsaida Nieves, University of Connecticut

• A Study of Utopic Education in Colonial India: Tagore, Elmhirst, Rural landscapes, and Villages - Debopam Sen, University of Wisconsin Madison

Discussant

• Noah W Sobe, UNESCO