SEAE Research Seminar Series: Parapedagogies of Resistance

You are invited to our next SEAE Seminar Series event on Friday, 18th October 2024.

The SEAE Research Centre Seminar Series promotes scholarly dialogue about transformational approaches that facilitate opportunities for profound change in education & research.

Abstract

In the context of the privileged, education has always been understood as an investment: children are our investments for the future. Neurotypicality, as the purveyor of sense that weaponizes knowledge as that which is owed to and owned by whiteness, begins at birth for those in the know. From teaching our “brilliant” children how to read before they can talk to enrolling them in the most costly daycares, the aim can never be said to be only teaching them how to learn. The aim is to organize them into the docility of knowing, into its posture. Neurotypicality names not the person, but the systemic operation that polices a certain modality of knowing and being. Education’s investment is in neurotypicality. Education’s primary investment is in the belief that those who occupy knowledge do so “naturally.” This is whiteness.

This talk will explore education from the perspective of the surplus-value of life that defies, and deviates whiteness. I will ask what else resistance can be if it is not a refusal mapped in the very logic from which it seeks to deviate. A logic of approximation of proximity through which blackness and neurodiversity co-compose will lead the way.