Policing Curiosity: An Educational Crisis

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium asks us to identify those contexts in which “curiosity is policed” and works to politicize curiosity. Based on the groundbreaking transdisciplinary volume, Curiosity Studies, to be unveiled at the 2020 AERA Annual meeting, each participant will be asked to bring in an example of this form of intellectual policing from a fieldwork, mediatized, or scholarly context with the intention of “decoding” this particular form of educational oppression. The goal of our endeavor is to open a space to take curiosity as a legitimate locus for educational critique, a means by which to challenge the hegemonic frames in which we continue to live and research and to open up a space for collaborative, public forms of educational praxis.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• Arjun Shankar, Colgate University

Papers

• The Politics of Curiosity - Perry Zurn

• Curious Entanglements: Opacity and Ethical Relation in Latina/o Aesthetics - Christina Leon

• Rethinking Curiosity - Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas

• The Campus Is Sick: Curiosity and Mental Health in the University - Arjun Shankar, Colgate University

Discussant

• Asia Ferrin, American University