Analyze

In this poster, we share preliminary reflections on the ways in which hermeneutic injustice emerges and operates within educational settings and interactions. Hermeneutic injustice is a type of epistemic injustice that occurs when someone’s experiences are not well understood by themselves or by others, either due to unavailability of known concepts or due to systemic barriers that produce non-knowing (Fricker 2007). In 2021, we entered into a collaborative project to design a high school curriculum on environmental injustice and climate change for California’s K-12 students. Although the project convenors aspired to support the diversity of California’s K-12 student population through representational inclusivity across the program participant, they reproduced essentialized notions of what it means to be an “included subject”. In our first inperson meetings, activities intended to invite difference in the curriculum writing and design community were encountered by participants as an opportunity to point to the margins of that community. Who was in the room and who was not? Initial counts excluded some writers whose identity was not readily apparent by race, ethnicity, or age. Some individuals who, to their consternation, were assumed to be white, revealed themselves as people of color. The project chose the “storyline model” of curriculum design to bring coherence across the teams. The model was developed by science educators to promote student agency and active learning. Lessons start with an anchoring phenomenon, which should hook students and produce enough questions to sustain inquiry cycles that culminate in consensus making. As a result, each grade-level unit of our curriculum was intended to focus on a single environmental phenomenon, like wildfire. However, informed by Gregory Bateson’s theory of learning, we sought to foreground complexity by recursively analyzing environmental injustice through case study analysis of many hazards, injustices, and places. It took multiple meetings over several months to arrive at an articulation of environmental injustice as our central phenomenon that recognizes the compounding impacts of both climate change and toxic pollution. It also required restructuring the working relationships between the project's administrative arm, the curriculum consultants, and the writing team. The image we include is a photograph of an exercise done together with another HS team as we were tasked to clarify the aims and goals of our imagined lessons. As is evidenced in the photograph, each writing team found it difficult to articulate learning outcomes as a series of checklists, or goals, separate from skill-development that represented the dynamic need for curriculum capable of examining climate change and the environmental justice needs for California’s students.

Tebbe, Margaret, Tanio, Nadine, and Srigyan, Prerna. 2023.  "Reflections on Hermeneutical Injustice in K-12 Curriculum Development." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

"Scott and Chakrabarty’s critiques tell us less about postcolonial studies’ limits than about the difficulty even its most eminent scholars have keeping its history in mind"

"Advocating resistance and critiquing the conditions of resistance are not, contra Scott, inherently opposed or even separate activities"

"During his “ethical turn,” Derrida reconceived the ultimate point of such deconstructive reading: no longer articulating différance it became instead responding to the experience of the other (Derrida 2002: 230–98; Spivak 1999: 426–8)."

"It becomes instead the capacity and willingness to surrender its agency to the other, thus exposing itself to a future it cannot control. Levinas’s redefinition of the human attempted, in its own way, to place the Hegelian tradition on its feet again. Though Gramsci and Fanon are both frequently assimilated to that tradition (as Scott’s and Chakrabarty’s critiques illustrate), the intellectual’s relationship to the colonized in their work prefigures, if again inchoately, the ideas of responsibility and futurity evident in Levinas and Derrida."

"The problem with Orientalism is precisely its ontological—not ethical—approach: the Orientalist seeks knowledge of the other to master it, decidedly not to protect its epistemic difference. [... ] Orientalism thus declares an epistemological as well as ontological difference between the European and the non‐European. Indeed, the former is the very source of the latter: Europeans and Orientals are different types of being precisely because they have different ways of knowing."

"[T]o think of responsibility as a freedom, you need that very humanistic education which teaches rebellion against it” (Spivak 2012: 461).4 “Humanist education” in general trains the “ethical reflex” in precisely the same way literary study in particular does: it opens one to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. Such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself: the oth- erness of some text—indeed, perhaps every text—will exceed what one has been taught."

"If Marxism responded to capitalism dialectically, wanting to replace it with a single and even more universal system, anti‐globalization movements now respond to capitalism deconstructively, wanting instead to articulate the disparate demands of those who build the global economy but are neither seen nor heard there. If they remain so, who will crawl, Spivak asks, “into the place of ‘the human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity?” (Spivak 2005: 23)."

"[T]he genealogy of postcolonial theory recounted here—from Gramsci and Fanon through Said and Spivak to Chakrabarty and Scott—can be read as a necessarily endless effort to rethink the revolutionary principle of freedom from the perspective of those to whom it was never designed to extend."

shortly attaching this news article on "coronavirus lockdown protests" to this reading. should be an obvious one to all. 

Re: the discussion on "our" concepts of freedom

--

Adding a popular quote - from Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" 

I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way out." I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense—I deliberately do not use the word "freedom." I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. "And that too is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.

No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.

The authors productively place three bodies of theory in conversation, abolitionist theories, urban political ecology, and decolonial theory, to rewrite the intellectual trajectories of EJ as extending the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. What are our intellectual and political genealogies as students and researchers of the quotidian anthropocene? What genealogies are we pushing against? Drawing from their examples of spaces and historical moments of interracial solidarity, what kinds of coalitions do we see ourselves partnering with and contributing to as (largely?) newcomers to the activism in Austin?

What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment?