When the Truth is not Enough: The Need for Speculative Narration of Educational Futurities

• In Event: The Fire This Time: Toward Dangerous Creativity in Intellectual Leadership

Abstract

“The truth will set us free,” that familiar refrain of Western emancipatory social movements, does not inspire the confidence it once did. Questioning this theory of change feels dangerous at a time when some politicians oppose teaching the truth about slavery and settler colonialism in history classes and are prohibiting teachers from even saying the word “gay.” Institutionalized oppression relies on lies for its perpetuation. Careful inquiry can establish truths that expose such lies, thereby depriving these systems of rational justification, if not their momentum and purpose.

A century of social science has shown us, however, that conceptions of truth can also be weaponized in the service of social violence. Defining truth exclusively in procedural terms can silence testimony about the way white supremacy, heteronormativity, and other forms of social violence that are difficult to document operate in schools (Bell, 1992; Delgado, 1989). Defining research rigor in exclusively critical terms can also lead to excess—as when Marxist scholars refuse to acknowledge that racism is more than economics; or when poststructuralists, in their effort to interrupt racial and gender essentialism, end up silencing testimony about experiences of identity-based oppression (King, 2017; Watts, 2013; Weheliye, 2014).

This paper looks at recent educational research that reaches beyond the limits of truth-telling and critique for means to advance social amelioration. Specifically, it looks at the way practices of speculative narration are being employed by scholars to call into being more just and promising educational futurities. The paper surveys social inquiry that is informed by several distinct theoretical literatures, including: Indigenous studies scholarship focused on the generative power of refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014); Sylvia Wynter’s call for an era of Homo Narans (humanity as storying beings) (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015); Afro-futurist speculative fiction (Toliver, 2021); Posthumanist philosophy of science that calls for more affirmative practices of inquiry (Barad, 2017; Braidotti, 2019); Deleuzian theories about becoming (Buchanan, 2017); Narrative inquiry informed by Deweyan pragmatism (Clandinin, et al, 2018; Barone, 2001); and Critical race theory counterstories (Bell, 1992; Delgado, 1989).

Based on an analysis of 300+ recent empirical studies informed by these theories, the paper identifies a variety of ways these studies have narrated the connection between inquiry and possible social futurities. These range from a general celebration of open-ended social possibility to explicit and detailed commitments to particular projects of social transformation. The former are found to be lacking, at best becoming a regression into an apolitical cosmopolitan ironism and, at worst, a familiar performance of white innocence. The latter more specific forms of speculation are found to be more vulnerable, compelling, and useful to building anti-racist, decolonial, love saturated educational futurities.

Using specific examples, this paper illustrates how understanding social inquiry as ontologically generative constitutes a shift from epistemology to axiology. Truth remains a relevant consideration in this movement, but it also calls on scholars to take responsibility for the consequences of their conceptions of knowledge by narrating anticipations of the subjectivities and affect they produce and the curricular politics they enable.

Author

• Jerry Roziek, University of Oregon