Nathan Snaza

What Teacher Education Can Learn From Blackface Minstrelsy

Research on the racial identities of White future teachers has assumed and circulated an overly simplified, and ultimately unhelpful, conception of White racial identity. An alternative is needed, which the authors develop with reference to scholarship that explores White people’s participation in blackface minstrelsy. They argue that at the core of White racial selves is a profound ambivalence that must be accounted for if future research is to better illuminate what the racial identities of White future teachers mean for their development as educators.

Against methodocentrism in educational research

Abstract This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual (part and parcel of empiricism), and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings.

The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism.

The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the environment are persistently caught within humanist traditions that place agency and action as sovereign to humanness. It uses new materialist ontologies to suggest how hybrid relations among humans, non-humans, and matter can be read by way of interactions among assemblages and entanglements that are alive, vibrant, and powerful. While much of environmentalism is bound to political action with nature as passive backdrops, the authors suggest that individual and everyday responses to ecological devastation may better reside in our capacity to act creatively, even horizontally, within political ecologies that disrupt theories of vertical domination and conquest.

The Death of Curriculum Studies and Its Ghosts

This article analyzes the rhetoric of “death” and “haunting” in curriculum studies by closely reading Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubmans Understanding Curriculum (2002). Drawing on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I argue in the first section of the article that the rhetoric of death appears at moments when the pressures of globalization upset the disciplinary assumptions of the field. In the second section, I argue that Understanding Curriculum is formally a “work of mourning” by reading the book along with Derridas writing on inheritance. The final section of the article takes up the problem of inheritance again, but turns to Friedrich Nietzsches writings on history and a scene from Lukes Gospel to formulate a conception of the field, usually obscured by the rhetoric of death and haunting, as driven by love.

#Blacklivesmatter: Racialization, the human, and critical public pedagogies of race

This chapter takes up the Black Lives Matter movement that appeared in the United States in recent years, organizing and coordinating responses to racialized state violence against black and brown persons, in order to analyze the biopolitics of racialization in relation to critiques of the dominant conception of “the human” in global politics. Drawing on the theories of Sylvia Wynter and Alexander Weheliye, as well as feminist and queer analyses of Black Lives Matter, we argue that prevailing ways of thinking “the human” as a source of the common in political struggle must attend to the relations among racialization, dehumanization, and affect. In the final section, we focus on a shift from “the body” to “the flesh” in black thought, one that allows us to conceptualize “fleshy pedagogies” that open onto forms of alterhumanist struggle against racialized state violence.

Animal Unconscious: Three Questions

ABSTRACT “Animal Unconscious” begins with Freud’s claim, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965), that psychoanalysis proposes “nothing animal is alien to us.” By drawing on recent scholarship in feminist, queer, new materialist, and posthumanist theory, the essay posits that the unconscious is something “animal,” not something uniquely human in order to inquire what this postulate would mean for thinking about 3 problems: the place of animality in institutions of analysis and (higher) learning, the animality of language, and the invention of new modes of kinship. Throughout, the essay speculates on what it means to recast “human” psychoanalysis as an animal practice while simultaneously opening it toward including nonhuman animals in its purview.

The Earth Is Not “Ours” to Save

The Anthropocene, as theorized by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, attempts to name the fact that the human has become a geological actor. Much of the contemporary discourse around environmentalism and climate change calls for humans to act in particular ways to avoid a catastrophe in an imagined future. Even as a case can be made that the catastrophe has already happened, my point of departure in this chapter will be this simple claim: that thinking human action can avert climate-related catastrophe is, in the most obvious way, a re-assertion of the human’s status as geological actant. The earth is not “ours,” even to save.

Posthuman(ist) Education and the Banality of Violence

On 18 April 1966, Theodor Adorno read a text on German radio called Pädagogik nach Auschwitz (later published as Erziehung nach Auschwitz) which begins with a statement whose force has not diminished in the half century since its utterance: ‘The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again’. The categorical nature of the statement – ‘all education’ – along with the insistence on ethical priority articulate a selfconsciously universal field of reference for an event that is named, perhaps paradoxically, through synecdoche. Before reading, or listening, past the first sentence, we are already dialectically caught between the universal and the particular. In discussions of how particular ‘Auschwitz’ is as a synecdoche, scholars have tended to run into a fork between radically exceptionalist understandings of the Shoah and attempts to understand that already considerably expanded cluster of institutions and events as instantiations of a still wider field of forms of modern violence. While Adorno was one of the first European thinkers to use Auschwitz, as a place name, to signal the Shoah more generally, in the half-century since his address, there has been considerable pressure to widen the frame still further. Yet this expansion of the reference of ‘Auschwitz’ to include a series of genocidal and quasi-genocidal projects (including European imperialism and trans-Atlantic slavery) has still tended, overwhelmingly, to draw its limit at intra-human violence. Given that Adorno’s address has become a sort of manifesto for Holocaust education, the task of this essay will be to pressure this limit, asking what happens to our thinking of education ‘after Auschwitz’ if other violences enter the orbit of our ethico-political consideration. As Kalpana Rahita Seshadri suggests, ‘perhaps it is time we acknowledge that we cannot do anything at all about the appalling ways human beings treat other human beings or animals without rethinking and renewing our norms, presuppositions, platitudes, and morals with regard to life and what is living’.

Aleatory Entanglements: (Post)Humanism, Hospitality, and Attunement--A Response to Hugo Letiche.

ABSTRACT This article is a response to Hugo Letiches “Bewildering Pedagogy,” an extended critique of many of Snazas published texts. In it, Snaza selected four important points of disagreement and elaborated four tensions between Letiches claims and his own present thinking—tensions that all turn on ontological and epistemological axioms about borders and the work of border policing. These are: the role that the political philosophy of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri plays in Snazas conceptualizations of politics; the precise meanings of “humanism” and “posthumanism”; the status and meaning of “animality,” especially the animality of the human; and the role of hospitality in understanding educational encounters. Using Letiches critique as a point of departure, Snaza elaborated a conception of education as bewildering, where various participants come together in unexpected and unpredictable ways to navigate their mutual exposure to “aleatory entanglement.”