Jason Wallin

Bon mots for bad thoughts

This article questions how the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has been received and connected to the field of curriculum theory. In an effort to reconnect Deleuze-thought to its political force, this essay commences a series of arguments pertaining to the ways in which the revolutionary thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have been reterritorialized in all-too-conservative ways. Recommencing a connection to the political activism and radical psychoanalysis of Guattari, this essay aims to create a renewed image of Deleuze-thought for curriculum workers and arts-based theorists invested in rethinking the problems of representation to which much educational thought remains fundamentally committed.

Living with monsters: an inquiry parable

From October 2004 to June 2006 I worked as a curriculum leader across 18 elementary schools as part of an Alberta Incentive for School Improvement (AISI) project focused on the reform question “How does inquiry transform learning environments?”. In support of professional development, I worked closely with teachers in discussion, planning, and co‐teaching from an inquiry‐based perspective. In this task, a “monstrous” image of inquiry‐based teaching and learning began to emerge among the project’s participating teachers. This essay inquires into the monstrous image accorded to inquiry‐based practice as a means to articulate the challenges and problematic of both school reform and the character of inquiry “itself”. Working analogously with T. H. White’s A Once and Future King, this essay seeks to interpret the monstrous and uncertain image of inquiry as vital to the character of the curriculum‐as‐lived.

Representation and the Straightjacketing of Curriculum's Complicated Conversation: The pedagogy of Pontypool's minor language

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonalds horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes.

Consuming abjection: an examination of death and disgust in the black metal scene

ABSTRACT This paper examines abjection in the context of the extreme (black) metal scene. Moving beyond the ritual-heavy, community work that dominates much of the death-related consumption literature, our study pieces together death, violence, misanthropy, blood and social tensions to create novel insights into the consumption of disgust. Based on our interview and participant observation methodologies, we present work that explains how death-oriented consumption and abjection is manifested for some consumers and actually plays a role as an affront to mainstream orientations and the greater social order. Additionally, our work indicates that the use of abjection can be seen as a boundary and source of delineation between the “acceptable” and the “unacceptable” in society.

Pedagogy at the brink of the post-anthropocene

Abstract The significance of educational research is today predicated on its ability to engage with the ecological, economic, and political challenges of the anthropocene, for where we might take seriously education’s commitment to the future necessitates a sustained encounter with the implications and questions raised in the wake of ‘our’ mutated planetary ecology. To repeat in the image of those educational practices, models and patterns of thinking that have contributed to the contemporary ecological crisis of the planet falls gravely short of apprehending what it might entail to live (and die) in the contemporary moment. Yet further, where education is intimate to teleology, it is today clear that the image of the future posited educationally has fallen out of synch with the ‘outside thought’ of ecocatastrophe, or rather, our being ‘thought’ from the inhuman perspective of a planet destined to go on without us. Educationally, this threat poses a quite remarkable opportunity, for where human thought might be doomed to extinction, the question of how and where we might think assumes urgency. In this vein, this essay explores the wisdom that ‘we’ are and will be thought from perspectives alien to human desire becomes a catalyst for how educational research might be rethought otherwise in a more-than-human world.

Guided by Voices.

‘‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men—The Shadow knows!’’ John Archer’s ominous introduction to the 1930s and 1940s radio serial, The Shadow, struck fear into wicked hearts with his ethereal tone. Vox et praeterea nihil—a voice and nothing more. Both mystic and hypnotist, the Shadow wielded the significant power to cloud the minds of others. In effect, the Shadow could disappear completely from the visual field, leaving nothing but his voice, a device that worked particularly well for radio. Yet, to the astonishment of pulp publishers Street and Smith, who produced the 1930’s Detective Story Hour, it was the voice and nothing more that affectively gripped their audience. In a Lacanian formulation, the Shadow’s voice is illustrative of an object that is more the thing than the thing itself. In other words, the Shadow’s voice is nothing but a voice, and yet concomitantly, so much more. Vox et praeterea nihil, wrote Plutarch of the plucked nightingale, its body pathetically insubstantial, its call an ‘‘empty’’ vocal gesture. In colloquial terms, one might venture that the nightingale is all ‘‘bark’’ and no bite. Yet in a collapse of what has become a cliché, the Shadow’s ‘‘bark’’ is its ‘‘bite.’’ The voice grips and compresses like canine jaws, holds one catatonic like a lurid hallucination. When the Shadow descends upon his quarry, it is his voice that seizes him or her in a paralytic fog, rendering him or her ‘‘helpless’’ to its ominous command. Uncanny in its disembodied tone and ghastly, reverb effected doubling, the voice of the Shadow impels the listener. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 32:93–111, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714410903482682

The Disappeared Future of Arts-Based Research, Parts I–VI: Towards a Reality-Without-Givenness

This essay marks a speculative attempt at thinking arts-based research—its strident commitments and contemporary movements—from the vantage of the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch characterized by the influence of human activity on planetary life. The challenges of this new global epoch are taken up as a speculative probe for assessing key fidelities and impasses within the field of arts-based research and their adequacy to a moment of vast planetary change. By shifting the ecological background of the field, the essay seeks to articulate a quite different project, stakes, and mood for arts-based research.

Second wave true Norwegian black metal: an ideologically evil music scene?

Purpose The second wave (true Norwegian) black metal music scene has garnered attention for its ostensible negative impact upon contemporary consumption. Producers and consumers of the scene, as potential heretics, have been associated with acts of church burning, Satanism, murder, and violence. Such actions have circulated under the signifier of evil, and have been associated with anti-Christian semiotics and pagan practices. Contemporary media has positioned such acts of evil beyond rational comprehension via the deployment of a rhetoric of evil. This enframement has evaded the psychoanalytic question of evil and the significant role of negative ethics in theorizing the allure and potential impact of black metal music. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evil in the music scene, its relation to ID evil, and its consumption and production practices. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon Zizek’s (2006) development of evil through Lacan’s three registers, this paper examines evil production and consumption through a detailed analysis of true Norwegian black metal. The authors rehabilitate the complex corridors of evil against its conceptual collapse as merely the ontological absence of good. Via Zizek, the authors offer a reconsideration of the anti-establishment violent activities enacted by some proponents of black metal ideology. Herein, the authors deploy a reading of ideological evil in order to interrogate the role of enjoyment and desire at work in the black metal scene. Findings After extensive immersion in the true Norwegian black metal scene, the authors elucidate on the key issues surrounding good, evil and Satanism, and their relationships to production and consumption. What many might term as “evil” is far more complex than what appears on the surface-level aesthetics. Originality/value While there have been examinations of the black metal scene, there has been scant literature that delves deep into the symbolism of the Satanic and the evil beyond the surface. This paper sheds light on the value of exploring evil in a scene as something that is much more than the mere absence of what is considered good.

Get Out from Behind the Lectern

As a tool for rethinking the material organization of the school, the concept of transversality might be introduced by way of a specific problematic linked to the conceptualization of currere in curriculum theory. Following the reterritorialization of the concept as a tool for resingularizing life in schools (Pinar, 1974), Pinar and Grumet (1976) mobilize currere against the specific problem of the subject’s becoming within the institution.

The Daimon, the Scarebird and Haiku: Repeated Narrations

Abstract The Daimon, The Scarebird and Haiku: Repeated Narrations is a discursive braiding of three texts surrounding the lived experience of embodiment. Read against and through one another, this manuscript is in part an experiment in textual disruption and derailed communication, inhabiting a liminal space teetering between recognition and the anxiety of crisis. The main body of this manuscript is haunted by multiple voices. The process of writing the main text of this manuscript is disclosed in italics, revealing in part the concepts and assumptions made by the authors prior to, and during the development of this work. The notes and thoughts of the authors during the writing of this manuscript appear in bold and point toward the inner difficulties and contested spaces of this work. As a reflexive methodology, The Daimon, The Scarebird and Haiku: Repeated Narrations might be read as an attempt at coauthoring which, while recognizing the familial, disrupts its own attempt at meaning-making. While we are aware of the difficulty this might pose for the reader, we attempt to maintain the space for interpretive possibility throughout this manuscript. This requires a certain hospitality toward interruptions, repetition, and silence. As pedagogues, we are charged with a similar task in encouraging the voice of students meaningfully, upon curriculum. In this vein, we attempt to engage the reader, as writer, in the braiding of our experiences, and seek to comeditate on the slippages and breaks inherent to the project of making meaning.