Surviving the Weather: Floods, Environmental Destruction, Prisons, and War, and the Curriculum of Unnatural Disasters #healingcurriculum

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Spatialized violence is often “naturalized” as disaster, discursively constructed as acts of nature when we talk of storms and disease, or acts of “human nature” when we talk of wars and prisons. Accompanying these human created disasters are the ways schools and education policy become instrumentalized by disaster capitalism. Disasters are products of neoliberal forces that disproportionately distress the neighborhoods, waters, lands, islands of communities of color and Indigenous people. And in the wake of disasters, neoliberal agendas find opportunistic places to grab hold. Thus, disasters are intersections of race, gender, class, legal status, and dis/ability - borrowing a metaphor from Christina Sharpe, the weather is literal and political. “The weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.”

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies

Chairs

• Vonzell Agosto, University of South Florida

• Valerie J. Shirley, The University of Arizona

• Kevin Lawrence Henry, University of Arizona

• K. Wayne Yang, University of California - San Diego

Papers

• Coastal Waters Devastation and Curriculum With Indigenous Youth - Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Climate Change, Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and Children's Curriculum - Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin

• Capitalizing on Disaster: Schooling Privatization in New Orleans, Chicago, and Iraq - Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Representing Disaster: Refugee Photography - Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University

• The Prison Industrial Complex as Naturalized Disaster - Crystal T. Laura, Chicago State University

Discussant

• M. Francyne Huckaby, Texas Christian University