Race, Reason, and Reasonableness: Toward an Unreasonable Pedagogy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Discursive Complexity and the Messiness of Curriculum Studies: Perversion, Falseness, Unreasonableness, and Anger

Abstract

Starting from the critical-theoretical notion of objective violence, as well as from phenomenological inquiries into processes of race and identity, this theoretical paper explores the relationship between racism and reasonableness. The reasonable connects the content of particular propositions with the inner truth of the form of thought, while also referring to what can be legitimated practically and morally. Working through neoliberal modalities of appropriation and penality, the category of the reasonable is an anchor for persistent processes of racial oppression in education. In this context, the paper argues for an “unreasonable” pedagogy that starts from a heterodox rationality, distills the anger of students and educators into collective movement, and speaks from unprecedented and unruly material and discursive spaces.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin