(Re)Opening Closed/ness: Hauntological Engagements with Historical Markers in the Threshold of Mastery

This project explored functionalities of (ghostly) mastery within the radical context of institutionally historical designations. We first identified historical designations of our university campuses and then, using Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) thinking with theory, entangled our hauntological perspectives with published “material” (e.g., university website articles, materials on official websites) and researcher generated photographs. As such, the purpose of this project is to loosen the grip of narrative mastery governing the designation of historical markers located throughout learning institutions. Thus, in unleashing ghosts/hauntings, we offer a theoretically informed opening towards troubling the vulnerability of history/ies, narratives, and spaces institutions seek to—and frequently successfully—master

Ghostly Entanglements: Exposing Temporal Matter(ing)s in Social Studies Education with (Re)Photography

Visual resources offer a variety of pedagogical advantages. Regardless of content, images can be leveraged to build critically analytical skills and used to cultivate dialogic literacies (i.e., articulations of thinking) about the social world. Further, images can be used to introduce and grapple with complex/abstract ideas. Given the relationship that social studies has to temporality (i.e., subjective engagements with the past, present, and future), visual resources also present teacher(s) (educators) with the opportunity to explore (theoretical) concepts foregrounding manifold relationships making up the social world (i.e., a world consisting of complex entanglements between non/human entities). The purpose of this research was to examine how secondary students dis/connect to the social world and the notion that every facet of historical phenomenon bears traces (upon traces) of multi-dimensional perspectives that deserve to be contemplated, interrogated, and valued (Derrida, 1993a). Specifically, this research was interested in understanding how foregrounding the relationship between space, time, and matter impacted secondary students’ engagements with temporally disjointed images or (re)photographs. As such, this inquiry asked: (1) What does (re)photography expose about secondary students’ dis/connections to the social world? (2) How do students dis/entangle with spacetimematter(ing)s when exposed to (re)photographs? Visual methodologies—specifically photo elicitation—were used to explore what was produced by 21 secondary students enrolled in a Global Perspectives course at a public high school in Northwest Florida during the 2019-2020 academic year when they engaged with (re)photographs and the concept of spacetimematter(ing). Posthumanist and poststructuralist perspectives informed the interpretation of the data corpus for this study, which was comprised from a collection of artifacts, observations, and semi-structured focus group interviews. Through a process that involved (re)reading, annotating, illustrating, and (re)organizing, the data were reduced to three overarching themes: (1) dis/connecting to (re)photography; (2) dis/connecting to materiality; and (3) pastpresentfuture(ing). These themes are teeming with assorted inter/intra-connected subthemes and were then used to help articulate three overarching findings: (1) (re)photography exposed how secondary students dis/connected to the social world and how they study it; (2) materiality plays a role in meaning-making; and (3) changes to materiality impacts how secondary students conceptualize temporality

Unveiling Perceptual Modes in Pre-Qualitative Inquiry

Teaching, learning, and practicing qualitative research are often discussed apart from one another, and with an emphasis on methods. Instead, this presentation focuses on how we taught, learned, and practiced pre-qualitative research (Rocha, 2017), inquiry through the lenses of humanities (i.e., history, philosophy) and the arts (i.e., painting), using modes of perception (artistic, aesthetic, semiotic, somatic) (Csordas, 1993; Klein, 2010; Shusterman, 2006). To illustrate the connection between our inquiry process and modes of perception, we present data from a pilot activity (art work, participant reflections, reflective observations), and draw on email chains (semiotic mode) of dialogue we engaged in over a six-month (2017-2018) process of simultaneously conceptualizing a book, professional development, and a research project. For example, the aesthetic and somatic mode of perception was evident in this sample of dialogue in which we deliberated over the title of our work: “How about ‘Unveiling’? That [metaphorical term] allows more sensory functions [includes ways of perceiving]: touch, see, perhaps smell”. This presentation offers suggestions for conterminously mentoring and developing graduate students and faculty in doctoral programs to activate multi-modes of perception across courses (i.e., research methodology, philosophy), and emphasize the pre qualitative (ideation) phase of education/al research leading to design

Theorizing mimesis across social studies contexts of mimicry, imitation, and simulation

Social studies education (SSE) commonly uses copying pedagogies (e.g., simulations) to help students develop a deeper understanding of self, others, curriculum, and society. This article argues that simulations are eminently mimetic (i.e., a theoretical orientation concerned with understanding the entangled relationships between originals and copies) and abound with overlooked opportunities to engage with double logics that traverse academic disciplines. Primarily, we theorize how mimetic concepts (e.g., protean, pharmakon/Janus-faced) can be capacious in providing needed nuance and texture to simulatory approaches to SSE through the demarcation of two specific mimetic registers within simulation(s): mimicry and imitation. Through these two mimetic gestures, this article calls for a more intra-disciplinary framing of SSE, thus offering an alternative corridor for SSE educators, students, and researchers to consider how simulations are used to make sense of the more-than-human world in both historical and contemporary contexts

D032 N07 C0MpU73: Exploring (Post)Human Bodies and Worlds with/in Droidial(ity) and Narrative Contexts

This article focuses on droidial bodies in children’s literature to explore how speculative literacies foster necessary spaces for thinking about (non)human and more-than-human connectivity. Specifically, we share what was produced when we applied a framework underpinned by posthumanist concepts to three children’s books centering robots. Using Jackson and Mazzei’s thinking with theory to plug into these books, this article raises (re)new(ed) questions about the intersections of literacy, humanism, and droids. It proposes that pairingposthumanist concepts with droidial texts can be generative in thinking about, critiquing, and predicting changes with the (ever-developing) relationship(s) between humans and machines

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

Ma(r)king The Unthinkable: Cultural and Existential Engagements of Extreme Historical Violence

Culture is an integral part of social studies education, and is a generative line of inquiry when placed in conversation with existential concerns. This post qualitative study engages with terror management theory (and its inspiration, the writing of Ernest Becker) to think about culture in the context of extreme historical violence. In particular, the authors re/read accounts from the Nazi massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland (1941) and the Hutu atrocities against Tutsis in Rwanda (1994) while pondering how perpetrators bonded over culture, ordinarilized evil, fetishized evil, and attempted to triumph over death. The authors invite readers to grapple with identifying (re)new(ed) ways of promoting a world that can hurt less by engaging with accounts of extreme violence to think through the cultivation of non-violent ways of be(com)ing

Min(e)d Your Metals: Inquiries into the Environmental Impact of Extraction

When most people think about climate change, the use of fossil fuels such as coal likely comes to mind. However, when it comes to mining, it is not just the product that harms people and the environment but also the process. Mining and extractive practices contribute to climate change, but they also do great harm to people directly and immediately. For example, the extraction of the coltan used in smartphones has led to highly publicized stories about child labor, war, and human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR). Less publicized examples include enormous damage done to Indigenous nations by the Red Dog zinc mine in Alaska, which according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Toxics Release Inventory, produces roughly 750 million pounds of pollution annually (Nobel 2018; Collins 2019), causing Alaska\u27s staggeringly high levels of environmental toxicity