Sensuous Curriculum: Of Politics and the Senses in Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Speaking at once to deep histories of educational scholarship (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Dewey, 1998/1934; Woodson, 1933) and a (re)emerging attention to the affectively ontological (e.g., Snaza, Sonu, Truman, Zaliwska, 2016), this symposium attends to ongoing questions at the intersection of education, politics, and the senses. Contributors to this panel wonder what makes sense, what is nonsense, and how understandings are rendered sensible—questions central to contemporary educational scholarship in curriculum studies, particularly those that regard processes of power, positionality, and identity. Drawing from their respective areas of educational expertise, this panel documents that the sensuous is always political, politics is always about what is sensible, and that curriculum is, at its heart, in and of the senses.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 3: Methodologies and Ethics (The Shapes of Curriculum)

Chair

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University

Papers

• Blackness and Sensuality in/as Educational Praxis - Valerie Kinloch, University of Pittsburgh; Carlotta Penn, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Kristeva, Foucault, and History: The Sensuous and Production of the Subject - David L. Carlson, Arizona State University; Joseph D Sweet, AZ

• Affected by Racism: Communities of Color as a Resistant Response to Raced and Racist Education in the Midwest - Boni Wozolek, Loyola University Maryland

• Intersecting Race, Language, and Identity: Toward a Sensuous Curriculum of Investment - Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa

• The Visceral Curriculum - Avi Desai Lessing, Oak Park and River Forest High School