Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Data, Disability, Detour, Détournement

2024-09-30T12:58:29-07:00

In the current upswell of interest in data visualization and infographics among visual arts educators there has not been sufficient reflection on the ideological baggage and policy implications of information presented as reliably neutral and factual. Such presumptions have been challenged by conceptualist artists for many decades, and particularly by disabled artists in the last decade, whose experiences with medical and assistive technology, and institutions more broadly, have led them to question the neutrality of communication. In this piece, I draw on the work of recent and contemporary artists, with an emphasis on both D/deaf artists and disabled sound artists, to suggest a starting point for art teachers who might seek to use art to problematize institutional uses and abuses of information.

Sonic Dread

2024-09-30T13:04:56-07:00

Informed by research on teaching difficult knowledge and sonic studies in education, this paper critically examines the affective implications of a common pedagogical strategy used to teach difficult knowledge: film. Studies of the use of film in the classroom tend to prioritize analysis that examines how students encounter difficult knowledge ocularly. However, there is little research regarding how teachers and learners process the sounds of trauma in film—specifically the sound of a gunshot. Given that American schools are places haunted by the ever-present specter of school shootings, educators must recognize that the eyes are not the only parts of our bodies that take in violence, and seeing is not the only sense that absorbs the always flowing and constantly circulating forces in the spaces we inhabit. Similar to seeing trauma, hearing it can be intensely destabilizing.

Listening to the Sounds of Healing

2024-09-30T13:12:44-07:00

This work attends to sounds that are sounded by human actors and the echoes of human actors in the lifeworlds and places where sounds are composed and consumed. The multidirectional vibrations of sounds are examined through the stories of three youth, Miriam, Sheldon, and Nellie, to understand how false communities found within schooling and familial spaces reduce listening to passive assimilation into hierarchical relationships that reify capitalistic purposes for listening, bodies, and (un)responses to sound. Within affective relationships, we explore how the youth restoried their engagements with sounds and the producers of sounds to explore and resist compliance, make agentive decisions to heal from coercive linguistic power relations, and create an otherwise sonic place of belonging.

“You Don’t Want to Sound Like You’re from Alabama”

2024-09-30T13:18:55-07:00

Using sounded methodologies, this paper attunes to the sonic and discursive slippages between how and Alabama are invoked in college student narratives of navigating the socio-historical context of race on a University campus. Listening and composing with sound offers a methodology for mapping the discursive, intellectual, and material geographies that reify and perpetuate the histories and ongoing traumas of white supremacy and racialization in higher education curriculum spaces at the same time as it offers entry points for refusing, re-negotiating, and resisting these legacies.

Bearing Witness to Violence Through Noise

2024-09-30T13:22:35-07:00

This paper explores the nature of earwitnessing, or the act of bearing witness through sound, via noise. Employing Thompson’s (2017) definition of the term, I argue that noise holds the pedagogical potential to address critiques of bearing witness and to pose a challenge to violent relations within the broader milieu. I do so by placing Thompson and other’s affective theorizations of sound in conversation with writings on affect in education. I then introduce scholarship on the educative potential of bearing witness to illustrate how noise can respond to the political shortcomings of witnessing by creating a pedagogical opening to critically reimagine affective economies. Finally, I ground this exploration within the album, Runzelstock & Gurgelstirn by Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck. Through the intentional deployment of noise, the album embodies the curricular potential of earwitnessing as a means to reckon with the affective relations that undergird violence.