The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of "the human". Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum, and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution, or action.
Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 2 brings creative sociopolitical research perspectives to flashpoints that emerge amid appeals to globalization, synoptic policy approaches, and new technologies – however defined. The chapters challenge prevailing notions of distance and difference, comparative philosophy, worlding practices, and contact zones. In the remaking of subjects, the unhoming of geopolitics, and new approaches to relationality, youth, and classrooms, complexities in preserving and questioning identity are laid bare and renovated. How technologies challenge and redefine racialization, engendering, and inter/nationalization are examined amid the reworking of oppression, success, well-being, politics, method, and power.
The volume will be beneficial for researchers seeking new approaches to education’s complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It is also a key text for post/graduate students and teachers interested in technological impact, globality, policymaking, and new ways of conducting research in contexts of digitalization and social media.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to Vol 2. 1. Aporias of Power: Witnessing, Space, and Technology Part 1: Sensory Overload? Vision and Sonics in the (Re)Making of Subjects 2. Analogue-Digital-Image: Shifting Constellations of Time, Bodies and Pedagogy in the Use of Media Technologies in Latin American Schools 3. Visual Narratives and the Eventalizing of “Mixed-Race” Subject-Bodies 4. Echo Chambers of Oppression: Sound(ed) Understanding and Deep Listening through Sonic Ethnography 5. Flashpoints on “Spaceship Earth”: Historicizing “global competence” and “international understanding” in the American curriculum of international education during the 1960s and 1970s Part 2: Un/homing Geopolitics, Philosophy and Power: Claims to Global/Local amid Earthquake and Drift 6. Global Interconnectivity and its Ethical Challenges in Education 7. The Shifting Space of Success: Well-Being, Gender, and Care Around Education Fever Within Educational Reform Discourses 8. Flashpoints of an immediate "here": A genealogy of locating the child in curricular thought 9. Cracks in the sidewalk: Looking behind the seamless surfaces of digital schooling
About the Author :
Bernadette Baker is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her work draws upon philosophy, history, comparative cosmology, and sociology as they intersect with curriculum studies, educational history, and philosophy, policies, and practices focused on well-being, new technologies, and the effects of power.
Antti Saari is Associate Professor (tenure track) at Tampere University Faculty of Education and Culture. Saari’s studies on educational research and governance have analyzed how transnational discourses of educational research and expert knowledge are translated to practices of evaluation, classroom management, and the use of instructional technology.
Liang Wang received her Ph.D. degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. She conducts transdisciplinary research in the transformation of education through digital technology, especially the digital recontouring of structural marginalization amid national and global education policy reform and technology-enhanced, anti-oppressive pedagogy.
Hannah Tavares is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her work explores the personal, relational, and diasporic, and the construction of geographical identity. Her practice draws from multiple cultural and disciplinary perspectives to examine the ambivalence and complexity of territorial and cultural boundaries. At the center of her work is the body, understood as a site of power and action.
Review :
"AI, Brainco technology, ChatGPT, genetic engineering... with the dramatic change of human life, what kind of future human beings are we supposed to become? What kind of social imagination can we conceive? What kind of education could be more relevant to future generations? What kind of methods or methodologies can we use to address these questions?
Flashpoint Epistemology, as a creative methodology against traditional and totalized epistemologies, provides possibilities for connecting and analyzing complicated phenomena and issues between the boundaries of curriculum, education, ethics, morals, technologies, cutting-edge science, religions, politics, and arts. The chapters in this book series presents different interdisciplinary flashpoints, emerging like the butterfly effect, which might become a storm in the curriculum field in reimagining and reshaping the landscape of curriculum and education for the future.
This book series evokes a new paradigm of curriculum studies, from “understanding curriculum (Pinar, 1995)” to “liberating curriculum for the future”, and calls for our involvement to conceive and transform education and human futures together."
-Prof. Wenjun ZHANG, College of Education, Zhejiang University.
"This two volume edition of ‘Flashpoint Epistemology’ is a must read for any educator interested in conducting and understanding research today. It provides an original insight of what ‘Flashpoint Epistemology’ is, particularly in relation to an interrogation of fixed ideas of place, home, death, life etc. It makes us challenge how complexities around these issues are forged, emerge and how they play out in modern day society – one which continues to be marred by risk, insecurity and instability. Original, insightful and totally engaging – an excellent contribution to research epistemologies."
- Professor Kalwant Bhopal FAcSS, Director, Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE), School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK
