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This Is Taking Too Long: Waiting on Settler Drives to Mutual Destruction

Mon, April 16, 12:25 to 1:55pm, Millennium Broadway New York Times Square, Floor: Fourth Floor, Room 4.02-4.03

Abstract

Objective
This paper asks the question, with full exasperation, full bitterness, full loss: “Where do you really think this is all going?” Posed at the outset at the height of frustration with the continued dispossession of Indigenous lands, constant and consistent antiblack violence, and environmental wrecking that typify North American settler societies, this is the unsaid question which throbs beneath the surface in educational research. Theories of change in educational reform and educational research which rely on piecemeal progress, on consciousness raising, on wait-and-see, on slow evolution unnecessarily put communities who experience precarity at risk. In fact, these approaches to reform produce precarity. Frustrating as this is, frustration is usually discarded as a productive affective response to the lack of societal change on the connected fronts of Indigenous dispossession, antiblackness, and climate change. This paper attempts to dispel the notion that frustration is an unhelpful response to the painfully slow change engendered by settler societies.

Theoretical Framework
This paper is rooted in Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism (Tuck, 2012; Coulthard, 2013; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Watts, 2013), and also attends to works which establish connections between settler colonialism and antiblackness in the United States and Canada (Byrd, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012; King, 2014). These theoretical approaches are often developed under the banner of Indigenous studies and Black studies, but are also meaningfully developed under the banner of education and curriculum studies.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry
These theoretical frames inform the approach of this paper, which moves between analyzing critical sites of contestation as reported in media, first person theorizing, synthesis of scholarly works, and the articulation of social theory. This is a conceptual mode of inquiry which brings together a variety of texts, media representations, stories of encounters, in order to generate new social theory or rearticulate a social theory which is newly relevant.

Evidence/Materials
The materials considered in this paper include representations of dispossession of Indigenous people, antiblackness, and climate change in media and educational research which absolutely should produce frustration, which then recommend routes to change which disregard or seek to diminish frustration. In raising and analyzing these examples, often from education sections of major news outlets, this presentation points to how the avoidance of frustration can lead to illogical policy and practice recommendations. Other texts include post climate-apocalyptic renderings of the future by writers in Indigenous studies and Black studies, to examine theories of futurity and survivability of settler restrictions on life and wellbeing.

Scholarly Significance
Educational research is not yet effective in establishing recommendations that will result in material outcomes which reduce antiblackness, dispossession of Indigenous peoples, or global warming. If the field cannot address the aspects of North American settler society which drive precarity, where do we really think this is all going? Frustration, which has been largely avoided in the field of educational research, may be the exact productive, generative, wise affective response required to make and inform needed change.

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