Monstrous Intimacies: The Sounding and Mis/hearing of Will/ful Literacies

In this paper, I contend that the tolerance for and presumed necessity of “ordinary” violence within educational spaces can be thought of as monstrous intimacies. Building on Sharpe (2010), I imagine these intimacies as more-than-human sonic entanglements that highlight how the ongoing violent processes of educational subjectification are affectively linked to intimacy as well as the material-discursive codes of the Enlightenment, slavery, and post-slavery. Specifically, I argue that the making of successful literacy learners within this first-grade classroom involved will (Ahmed, 2014), or attempts to immobilize matter as an active vibrational force in order to affirm children as rational, thinking subjects disconnected from the “body of the classroom.” Such will ignored how sounds, bodies, spaces, and “things”—as a collection of affects—extended relationally into children, participated in literacy events, and made children’s bodies vulnerable to monstrous intimacies—particularly boys of color who were often excluded for transmitting willfulness

Queer Ecologies: One Year Later

Reflecting on a soundart installation one year later troubles the question, “What are we going to do?,” decentering objectives with justification. Nested “laters” anticipate and evoke memories of past futures and future pasts, challenging direct study of crises and catastrophic predictions that reproduce an anthropocentric fixation on “What knowledge is of most worth?” Knowing and sharing things is magical, empowering, and individually self-fulfilling. Yet we can learn from those indigenous traditions in which magicians and shamans simultaneously offer prayers and ritual gestures to other animals, and to the powers of the earth and sky. The obligation is to ensure from the edges of our village that boundaries between human culture and the rest of nature stay porous and overlapping. Sharing what we know will not save the world. Developing forms of leadership, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement that enrich and expand reconnection with stewardship has a chance to do so

Chocolate Spectral Resonances: Calling Mr. Sun Ra, Calling Mr. Alton Sterling

In this discussion I utilize pianist, composer, band leader, and sound scientist Sun Ra, and his ensemble the Arkestra to address sonic ethics in two ways: first to re-examine the treatment of Alton Sterling, a Black man lynched by the Baton Rouge, LA, in 2016 and, second, to consider broader possibilities of how Afro-surrealist ethics, situated as sonic pedagogies, provide possibilities, simultaneously in formal and informal educational spaces/places, to disrupt ideological constructs situating Black life as equated to death

From Currere to Ambire: An Ambient Curriculum

This article follows one elementary school teacher navigating the challenges to her curricular commitments posed by the coronavirus pandemic in a major city. I explore what happens when she engages with Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled piece of sound art, to offer audiences with access to Central Park an opportunity to listen to orchestral music while maintaining social distancing. I extend Lauren Berlant’s theory of “ambient citizenship”—a way of thinking about political belonging in ordinary scenes at the intersection of sound, movement, and affect—to consider how an ambient curriculum opens up new ways of understanding knowledge, identity, and possibility. I argue that SOUNDWALK made heard an ambient curriculum that already existed—in ambulance alarms, eerie city and school silences, Zoom feedback, and feeling unheard—and, for a moment at least, dislodged the ‘stuckness’ of going on amid it all

Material and Affective (Re)shapings within Unspeakable/Uninterrupted Territories of Violence

How might we refuse historically censored, sustained, and whitewashed frames and forms of quotidian violence that drag our attention towards registers of inevitability and predictability? This conceptual article considers assemblages of violence in the context of historical and ongoing reverberations of antiblack racism in the United States. Specifically, the authors consider various material and affective intersections that produce movements with/around/under/through time, space, and human and more-than human bodies; the liminal texture of conscious knowing and subconscious feeling that is always-already in flux; and the incalculable and perhaps unfulfilled possibilities/futures that await all encounters within the more-than-human world. We tether our theoretical orientations to three contexts implicated in unspeakable/uninterrupted territories of violence: cotton plant and fear, computer and suspicion, and skateboard and joy

Desire, Interspecies Love, and Becoming-Animal: Reading “The Overstory” in Social Studies Education

This article springs from our readings and re-readings of The Overstory (Powers, 2018), a text that moved us and changed us. In this article, we conceive of The Overstory as an affective aesthetic text, agentic in its capacity to jolt readers awake and precipitate ontoepistemological swerves in new and unexpected directions. We build from visions of textual engagements that bring a reader to life, disclosing new pathways and possibilities for how to be, feel, and know one another in the world, a world replete with ethical responsibilities, matterings, and entanglements that stretch far beyond the human. Disassembling The Overstory, we string together particular threads with theory and our own engagements with the novel, offering speculative curriculum/classroom futures—visions of what agentic texts like The Overstory can quite literally do (open up, bind together, create, shape, and so on) in social studies education

Lesson Plans as Objects of Cruel Optimism and the Rhizome as a Way Out

The objective of this article is to use a theoretical framework to reconceptualize the process and purpose of lesson planning as a way to liberate teachers from systems that prevent educator and student flourishing. I argue that an attachment to lesson plans as static objects produces a state of “cruel optimism” that erodes both student and teacher satisfaction, development, and engagement. Conversations with two social studies teachers will ground theory in practice, and will help to illuminate the ways in which thinking with theory can be an effective way to reimagine pedagogical approaches

Essay Book Review, Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel

The present essay book review is on Jussi Saarinen's (2020) book, Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel. The book makes profound connections between philosophy of emotion and aesthetics and relational psychoanalytic thought considering the dynamic relationship artists have with their painting work, focusing on the wide range of feelings generated. Many connections can be drawn and are relevant for curriculum theorizing in teaching and curriculum work. I believe Saarinen's book to be essential for scholars working in curriculum studies, whether working in visual arts education, general education, or theorizing about creativity due to the rich interdisciplinary nexus between psychoanalysis and philosophical thought of affect and creative experience. I encourage the reader to make links between Saarinen's theorization of the 'artist and painting' and the 'teacher and curriculum.

Restoring the (dis)course: An inquiry into Aesthetics and Realism

Aesthetics is the study of beauty and aesthetic inquiry situates the study of beauty within lived experience. This paper is an inquiry into aesthetics and is aimed at restoring the (dis)course associated with direct experience and the implications of realism. Utilizing the lens of curriculum studies, a metaphoric description of a local river is incorporated into the discussion to highlight the impact of education on the life journey. Also, a discussion on literalism is utilized as an important dialectical point of departure. Finally, an examination of related literature and an autobiographical interlude offer a unique perspective leading to a more critical approach to curriculum theorizing aimed at revitalizing the aesthetic dimension within educational discourse