A play among worlds: “aching, moving irresolutions”

• In Event: Experiences of educators, students, and parents in various settings

Proposal

After years of experiencing a disconnect with Global Citizenship Education (GCE) discourses, but a deep connection with the interplay of the global, the citizen, and education, I began trying to write myself into a place where I could feel something about these ideas again. I ended up somewhere between the social sciences and the humanities, somewhere between the deeply personal and the collective.

In this presentation (whose subtitle is adapted from Haslett (2017, p. 5) on Susan Sontag’s work), I will present the resulting project. As a (non-)poet, (non-)playwright, and (non-)artist, I curate original prose poems, letters, and a conversational dialogue “play” of interdisciplinary texts - including those who inspired the play’s style, like Sarah Manguso’s aphoristic 300 Arguments (2017) and Cesár Aira’s fugia hacia adelante technique (Malone, 2012, pp. 2-3).

Interspersed with my interjections, the “play” of texts and the enveloping fragments of personal writing before and during the pandemic aim to disrupt, question, and leave space for the reader to generate new meanings of GCE, and, beyond these themes, of the often painful and evolving experiences - “aching, moving resolutions” - that result from taking the risk of playing among, and ultimately being in, fuller relationship among worlds.

The presentation will discuss what this play/(postfoundational) project looks like in form (with many titles/section framings clearly drawing on Deleuze, Guattari):

Prologue: (Non-)Artist Statement
Part I: The Journals: intertextual curations in search of a smaller self (Allen, 2018, p. 26)
-Prologue: After the beginning of the virus: signifying breaks
-Before the virus
--Introduction
--Rhizomatic discussions: assembling small lines of flight
Part 2: Relational aesthetics: micro-histories of emotion - more non-poems to humans and non-humans
Epilogue: after the beginning of the end of the virus: re-assembling ourselves for flight

In academic-speak, at the creative nexus of the social science and the humanities, this piece uses various “experimental” writing forms to explore “alternative thinking of alternatives” (Santos, 2014, p. 42) about the themes above. In Riotous Epistemology, R. Gilman-Opalsky and Shukaitis (2020) draw on Holloway (2010)’s concept of “other-doing” – ‘different ways of thinking and imagining other worlds’ (p. 3). They consider their individual and collective work, explaining their interest in ‘know[ing] how to say different things in different way’ and in the role of the non-expert:

"In The Composition of Movements to Come, Stevphen asks: 'How do avant-garde practices shift what is said, and how it can be said?' (2016) In Specters of Revolt, I ask: 'What is the critical content, at least paradigmatically, that the qualitatively different logic of revolt poses to the logic of the established order?' (2016). So, each of us on our own wants to know how to say different things in different ways, and we are interested in logics oppositional to the logic of the existing order of life. Avant-garde practices and social upheaval challenge epistemological assumptions about what knowledgeable speech looks like because they are full of knowing, and thinking, and criticizing, and imagining, and yet they do not look anything like 'knowledgeable speech.'" (p. 4)

" ….There’s something quite important about opening up spaces for non-expert creativity….[to] interact differently, with a different logic" (p. 34)

It is my hope that my non-expert “other-doing,” which perhaps does not “look anything like ‘knowledgeable speech,’” may expand the possibilities of what and whose voices count as “GCE” in the continual search for evermore creative, nuanced, and intersectional responses to complex global issues. My work aligns with other current calls emerging during the pandemic “for a renewed relationship between the arts and intercultural citizenship education that explores sustained imagined worlds; stimulates empathy; promotes the critical development of languages towards dialogue; inspires social, cultural, and political action; and demands transformation” (Matos & Melo-Pfeifer, 2020).

The project concludes by inviting those who engage with it to explore these characteristics and make their own meanings within my “imagined worlds.”

The presentation will specifically explore how my fifteen years in CIE/S, and participation in this SIG since its inception, has affected the development of this project and the potential contributions that such interdisciplinary, postfoundational work can make to CIE/S, including at the nexus of CIE x GCE. I will highlight how the work directly responds to three conference (sub-)themes, firstly “Beyond the Horizon,” in that it “play[s] with new ideas, theories, and ways of knowing in education and educational research, imagin[es] what can be done based on what has been learned and can be unlearned, [and aims to] desig[n] a future that is yet to be dreamed.” Secondly, as the structure of the project alludes to, it also responds to the theme “Tectonic Shifts – Adapting to Trauma in the Moment,” particularly “… theoretical approaches to address the pandemic and its impact on education.” Thirdly, it is fundamentally rooted in the theme of “Orbits Aligned – How Place Makes the Difference,” specifically “theoretical…approaches to research that examines the idea of space and place.”

I envision two-thirds of the presentation to be a reading of the play, and one third as a discussion with the participants in the session about their experience of engaging with it, exploring the themes of this abstract as we find them relevant.

Allen, S. (2018). The Science of Awe. Retrieved from Berkeley, CA, USA: https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf?_ga=2.199890855.829368740.1571290929-878582129.1571290929
Gilman-Opalsky, R. (2016). Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below. London: Repeater.
Gilman-Opalsky, R., & Shukaitis, S. (2020). Riotous Epistemology: Imaginary Power, Art, and Insurrection: Autonomedia.
Haslett, T. (2017). A Critic at Large: the Other Susan Sontag. The New Yorker(December 11). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/the-other-susan-sontag
Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Malone, T. (2012, March 14, 2012). Fleeing Forward: On César Aira’s Varamo. Retrieved from https://themillions.com/2012/03/fleeing-forward-on-cesar-airas-varamo.html
Manguso, S. (2017). 300 Arguments: Essays. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.th/books?id=ArzlDQAAQBAJ
Matos, A. G., & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2020). Art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(4), 289-299. doi:10.1080/14708477.2020.1786917
Santos, B. d. S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Shukaitis, S. (2016). The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University