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Curricula as contested and contesting spaces: Geographies of longing, resistance and (dis)comfort
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference London, 30 August to 1 September 2017
Paul PrinslooUniversity of South Africa (Unisa)
@14prinsp
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
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I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this presentation. I therefore acknowledge the original copyright and licensing regime of every
image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Alternative title:
A (dis)organised, stuttered reflection on participating in the decolonisation
discourse as a white African male
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
Central to this presentation is the proposal to consider the curriculum as an officialised map, created and endorsed by those in the cartographic office. This map presents not only the official version of the past, but also acts and is used as powerful tool to
shape the future.
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afrika_Map_1689.JPG
Maps not only visualise the inclusion and exclusion of territories, but also present these inclusions/exclusions
as normalised and uncontested.
Image credit: https://fullfact.org/media/_versions/uk-border-passport-control-eu-facebook_social_media.jpg
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But there are also those who usurp, question, vandalise/deface and contest these officialised
maps, borders and its monuments
Image credit: http://thedailyaztec.com/81659/news/presentation-explores-dangers-of-crossing-the-border/
By Paul Prinsloo (University of South Africa) @14prinsp
Image credit first slide: http://connect.citizen.co.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2015/10/C2.jpg?81cf05
The ‘curriculum as contested space’ #RhodesMustFall #ScienceMustFall
#DecoloniseThe Curriculum
Page credit: http://ewn.co.za/2015/04/10/Rhodes-statue-removal-only-the-beginning
#ScienceMustFall
Page credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
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NBC News source credit: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/christopher-columbus-statue-new-york-city-could-be-considered-removal-n795316
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Page credit: http://all-monuments-must-fall.ghost.io/all-monuments-must-fall-a-syllabus/
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Page credit: https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f#.om5w2ivfq
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
Overview of the presentation
• Situating myself in the discourse• Five pointers for thinking about the
curriculum as contested and contesting space
• Four discursive spaces for consideration• (In)conclusions
Who am I? What/who gives me the right to speak?
How do I as a 58 years old, white, gay male talk about and participate in discourses re decolonising the curriculum/knowledge?
How do I disentangle my tentative contribution from my position of being a settler, having grown up in settler communities, schools, and going to a settler university where the language of tuition was a settler language, and where people of displaced communities and their epistemologies were marginalised and excluded?
(See Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013)
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“What is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness, …to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side?”
(Alcoff in Applebaum, 2010, p. 3)
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How do we acknowledge our own investments in whiteness that “can obscure how white people even with the best intentions are implicated in sustaining a racially unjust system”?
(Applebaum, 2010, p. 10)
Whiteness as the Midas touch…
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Midas_gold2.jpg
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I therefore do not plead innocence, look for sympathy or absolution or use this presentation as gesture of a
“false generosity” (Tuck & Fine, 2007, p. 154),
but as “coming clean, coming out … unforgetting” (Tuck & Fine, 2007, p. 155).
(Also see Westcott, R. (2004). Witnessing whiteness: articulating race and the "politics of style”. Borderlands 3(2). Retrieved from
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/westcott_witnessing.htm)
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Three options for writing about whiteness as white person (Westcott, 2004)
• Writing as confessional – putting whiteness, again, in the center of the experience
• Writing autobiographically, versus autobiographic writing
• “Writing the dis-organised self” where I stutter, collapse, and mumble (par. 43), where I open myself to connections, to the not-yet. “It is, … a sortie, a way forward’ (Westcott 2004, par. 49).
Westcott, R. (2004). Witnessing whiteness: articulating race and the "politics of style”. Borderlands 3(2). Retrieved from
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/westcott_witnessing.htm)
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
See Robert Thuerck July 16, 2013 –http://www.sustainablediversity.com/?p=208
The Fool’s Cap Map of the World(Oronteus Fineus 1580-1590)
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Any act of ‘mapping’ includes and excludes.
In the “battle of the maps” the person or power who controlled the cartographic office was the most powerful. All space had to be subordinated to “one and only one, officially approved and state-sponsored map”
(Bauman, 1998, p. 31)
1. The curriculum as map
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2/Where the cartographic office started off by
officialising space, as it were, by mapping it, maps became important tools in the hands of the powerful to “reshape” spaces.
“Before, it was the map which reflected and recorded the shapes of the territory. Now, it was the turn of the territory to become a reflection of the map, to be raised to the level of orderly transparency which the maps struggled to reach”
(Bauman, 1998, p. 35)
2. Who creates these maps? Who are in the cartographer’s office?
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cartographer_Pietro_Vesconte_(1318).jpg
• Faculty – gender, race, tenure/non-tenure, age, onto-epistemologies, ideological positions
• Disciplines – what is (not) allowed• Institutions – alignment with mission, vision• Industry• The [market]• Accreditation and quality assurance regimes• National governments• Asymmetries in knowledge production –
North/South/developed/developing• Academic journals• Publishing houses• Google/Social media
3. The curriculum is a “contested space” (Prinsloo, 2007) and “an arena of struggle” (Shay, 2015)
Image credit: Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele by Lieutenant Alfred Bastien, 1917, oil on canvas. Retrieved from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_art
The ‘what’ of the curriculum is determined by those who lay claim to retell the past
… and they will protect their claim at all cost because their account of the past cements their current and future interests and power
4. The curriculum as a battle for ownership of the past and as a space to make a different future possible
Source credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCUX3SWSFs
We are now here. We have come for you. We are taking you back home
The ‘what’ of the curriculum is determined by those who lay claim to own the future …
… and they will protect their claim at all cost
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Nitriensis,_f.20r_(Syriac_text).jpg
5. The curriculum as palimpsest
Soft-reformspace
Radical-reform space Beyond-reform space
Modernity’s life support Modernity’s palliative care
Rec
ogn
itio
n o
f e
pis
tem
olo
gica
lheg
emo
ny
Never have been
happier, healthier, wealthier
Problems addressed
through personal
transformation
Problems addressed
through institutional
change
The game is awesome! Everyone can win once we know the rules
The game is rigged, so if we want to win we need to change
the rules
The game is harmful and makes us immature, but we’re
stuck playing
Playing the game does not make sense
Rec
ogn
itio
n o
f o
nto
logi
calh
egem
on
y
Rec
ogn
itio
n o
f m
etap
hys
ical
entr
apm
ent
Racism
Capitalism
Colonialism
Heteropatriarchy
Nationalism
Race, capital, heteropatriarchy
as modernity (unfixable)
Alt
ern
ativ
es
wit
h
guar
ante
es
Hac
kin
g
Ho
spic
ing Other modes
of existence based on different
cosmologies
? ?
(Adapted from de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015,p. 25)
A way forward: Four spaces of enunciation
(In)conclusion
“The past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no taking it back, setting time aright,
putting the world back on its axis. There is no erasure finally”
(Barad, 2010, p. 264)
So where does this leave me as white, 58 year-old male [etc.] cartographer?
• The modern global capitalist map of the world is unsustainable and collapsing
• My/our language(s), maps, identities and sense-making are inescapably connected to it
• “Hospicing enacts a willingness to learn enough of (re)current mistakes of the current system in order to make different mistakes in caring for the arrival of something new”
de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015,p. 28)
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/empty-abandoned-messy-grunge-scene-863118/
Thank youPaul Prinsloo Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)College of Economic and Management Sciences, Office number 3-15, Club 1, Hazelwood, P O Box 392Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)T: +27 (0) 82 3954 113 (mobile)
[email protected] Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog: http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp
