44.029 - Making Up People: Futurities, Fear, and Hope

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The symposium seeks to denaturalize discourses of futurities in global education reforms. The papers cohere in their theoretical engagement with educational reforms as de/reterritorializing forces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that participate in “making up” particular subjectivities (Hacking, 1986). As reforms travel, they are translated to address unique cultural, political, economic anxieties. At the same time, these reforms require scrutiny for what kinds of people are made problematic and subject to reform. The symposium also suggests a potential paradox that relates to the annual theme of “achieving the promise of equal educational opportunity:” Does the promise of equality in global education reform discourses first demand making up target populations as problematic or as dangerous to the future and as requiring change?

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 2: Histories and Futurities (The Frames of Curriculum)

Chair

• Jinting Wu, University at Buffalo - SUNY

Papers

• Envisioning the Future: In/exclusion of Competency Discourse in Global Citizenship Education - Ji-Hye Kim

• Contesting a Transnational Crisis: A History of "the Child," "the African," and "the Mind" - Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas

• Mental Hygiene and the Regulation of "Problem Child" Populations as Limits of Republican Subjectivity - Yasin Tunc, University of Georgia - Athens

• Who the Future Citizens Should Be: The Conceptualization of Globalization in China - Xue Yin, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Jinting Wu, University at Buffalo - SUNY