"Diversity" Never Again: Alternative Temporalities in Curriculum Studies

• In Event: A Decolonized Curriculum Future: Toward Geopolitical Traditions of Educational and Cultural Criticism

Abstract

Objectives
Slogans such as “Guatemala Never Again,” and “Rwanda Never Again” draw historical attention to the extermination of multiple ways of beings. This paper channels the warning from these slogans to trouble “diversity” and the ways in which it travels uninterrogated in curricular traditions, reconceptualist or otherwise. I propose alternative temporalities for curriculum engagement attuned to the fractal nature of relationships in the historical making-up of particular kinds of people.

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
Fractal curriculum inquiry’s leading notion is inspired by the Popol Wuj. Fractal time, a notion readable in the Mayan Popol Wuj, according to Carlos López (2011), defies monologic, linear, and vectorial time. In this notion, time evolves and involves, expands and contracts, moves in different directions, and is not fixed. In addition to the Popol Wuj, eventalizing temporalities draws from the contributions of Benoît Mandelbrot (on fractal geometry, 1977; 1982), Gilles Deleuze (on the event, 1969; 1988), Ian Hacking (on making-up kinds of people, 2001; 2004; 2006), and Lorraine Daston (on objects of scientific inquiry, 2000).

Modes of Inquiry, Data, and Analysis
This study draws from qualitative technologies such as classroom observations, interviews, and public participatory research. These techniques are enriched by document analysis of texts and images in archives related and unrelated to education. This is a historical curriculum inquiry that reads the current and the past as past and present at the same moment in the making and remaking-up of human kinds.

Findings
Curriculum studies archives and the organization of the field is set on a template that takes for granted the making-up of human kinds. The state, white, and straight, even though presented with a queer outlook, remain normative in engaging with the multiple ways—possible beyond the imagination—in which people engage and participate. The preoccupation (or results) emerging in this study follow the manifestaciónes of certain historical-geo-and-political locations in places historically fabricated as “Latin America.” This manifestaciónes demand a cease-fire of diversity and its homogenizing impulses camouflaged as protective of multiplicity.

Scholarly Signficance
The significance of this study is in resetting the horizon of enactment of curriculum studies as a field whose allegiances must be reinvented to refuse futuristic, salvific, and developmental trajectories that reinscribe the extermination of multiple ways of being when the state (often translated as the US), straight, anglo, and white are the orbit on which the curricular imagination revolves.

References
Daston, Lorraine. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Continuum International Publishing Group, 1988.

———. The Logic of Sense. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Hacking, Ian. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” London, 2006.

López, Carlos M. “Tiempo y fractales.” Guatemala City, 2011.
Mandelbrot, Benoît. Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. 1st edition. San Francisco:
W.H.Freeman & Company, 1977.

———. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. 1 edition. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982.

Author

• Ligia L. López López, The University of Melbourne