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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.

Sabina Vaught’s Compulsory challenges conventional understandings of state schooling through an ethnographic exploration of the juvenile prison school system in the United States. Vaught examines the ways in which juvenile prison and prison school are shaped by legal and ideological forces working across multiple state apparatuses. Vaught depicts these forces vividly through her ethnographic focus on Lincoln prison school, a site serving “as a window onto the massive institutional practices of juvenile schooling, knowledge production, and incarceration in the United States” (19). Her ethnography maps the network of relations converging through this site—between prisoners, teachers, state officials and mothers. In doing so, her ethnography captures an illustrative account of the institutional assemblages at work in constituting the state through material and ideological practices of dispossession and education of young Black men. She demonstrates the ways in which the state disproportionally displaces young Black men from home and subjects them to abuse, captivity, and forced submission through its educational apparatus.

 In her approach, Vaught highlights distinct spaces of interest: inside and outside the juvenile prison school system. She works with these designations to map institutional powers across different spaces, arguing that “Inside and Outside are places just as Seattle and Canada are proper nouns with distinct features, bounded space, governing rules, sociocultural symbology, and so on” (12). In mapping these spaces, Vaught is also attentive to who is present and who is absent, both discursively and materially. Absences are recognized as shaping the field in which Vaught is working—for instance, her ethnographic focus on young men in prison schools is largely an outcome of institutional practices of hiding young black women from view. In the logic of prison administrators, “girls were too vulnerable to be exposed to research” (17)—despite paradoxically deemed “dangerous” in justifying their captivity.

Vaught’s attention to absence is also explicit in her examination of removal, as a practice aimed at disrupting the private spheres of people of color through prisons and schools. Removal entails the physical relocation of students from their homes to schools, where “they are subject to meaningless or hostile captive educational performances” (321). Removal, as Vaught demonstrates, is essential to the continuous construction of the US as a White, heteropatriarchal nation.

More specifically, removal disables the possibility of a Black private sphere by disrupting kinship relations between young Black men and their families and making young Black men into prisoners. Removal acts as an assault “on Black women as custodians of the house of resistance, on Black boys as figments of White criminal imaginations who antithetically define White male innocence and citizenship, and on Black girls as both hyperaggressive and broken ghost victims” (321). The state works to supplant other social and family relations with carceral kinship relations, which normalize and legitimize the removal process. This process is further reinforced with the psychological manipulation of young men through state-imposed “treatment,” which corrodes their sense of free will and promotes feelings of internal, individual culpability for their exclusion from citizenship.

Vaught argues that this disruption of Black private spheres is significant because these are important spaces of resistance, in which counter publics are formed. In the United States, “the public” is leveraged as a tool of white supremacist control in limiting the power of some. Rights themselves are exclusive and private—limited to those possessing property, a condition of whiteness dependent on the exclusion of people of Color. Dispossession and education are practices that maintain and rationalize this exclusivity, as young Black men are denied the possibilities of citizenship. These practices serve to protect the interests of the White state, to which the potential emergence of private Black citizens (and their potential publics) act as threats: “White freedom, will, and fitness for self-governance exist only through the ideological and structural denial of those very things in Black people” (322).

In her attention to the interrelations between the white supremacist state, prison schooling, and critical scholarship, Vaught offers direction for activists and scholars invested in social justice and education—particularly in her critique of the school-to-prison pipeline, which draws attention to the limitations of reform. As an apparatus of the state, schools are meant to function as prison pipelines. Scholars and activists applying the prison-to-pipeline logic in advocating for education reform overlook this essential fact and “unintentionally confirm the principal, most damaging misconception of school: that it is good” (37). Vaught’s Compulsory supports and gives life to alternative theoretical approaches focused on the racist organization of schools in relation to prisons. In this, Vaught exemplifies her approach to theory as stewardship: theory is “a stewardship of a kinship network of meaning. It is not just an abstraction we take up and give life to page by page but rather a living force that in some ways takes us up” (41). Ultimately, Vaught’s theoretical stewardship offers meaningful direction for scholars and activists: “State schooling … is the beating heart of a supremacist state. … To take on the heart of the state requires further mapping its reaches” (323).

ENVOI

p.232: "In these pages, I have repeatedly emphasized the complicity between subject and object of investigation. My role in this essay, as subject of investigation, has been entirely parasitical, since my only object has been the Subaltern Studies themselves. Yet I am part of their object as well. Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte d'entree into the elite theoretical ateliers in France, I bring news of power lines within the palace. Nothing can function without us, yet the part is at least historically ironic. What of the poststructuralist suggestion that all work is parasitical, slightly to the side of that which one wishes adequately to cover, that critic (historian) and text (subaltern) are always "beside themselves"? The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay."

p217: "[Subaltern Studies] can never be continuous with the subaltern's situational and uneven entry into political (not merely disciplinary, as in the case of the collective) hegemony as the content of an afterthe- fact description. This is the always asymmetrical relationship between the interpretation and transformation of the world which Marx marks in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. There the contrast is between the words haben interpretiert (present participle—a completed action—of interpretieren— the Romance verb which emphasizes the establishment of a meaning that is commensurate with a phenomenon through the metaphor of the fair exchange of prices) and zu verandern (infinitive—always open to the future—of the German verb which "means" strictly speaking, "to make other"). The latter expression matches haben interpretiert neither in its Latinate philosophical weight nor in its signification of propriety and completion, as transformierien would have done. Although not an unusual word, it is not the most common word for "change" in German—verwandeln. In the open-ended "making-other"—Veranderung—of the properly self-identical—adequately interpretiert—lies an allegory of the theorist's relationship to his subject-matter."

p217: "If it were embraced as a strategy, then the emphasis upon the "sovereignty,... consistency and...logic" of "rebel consciousness" (EAP, 13) could be seen as "affirmative deconstruction": knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically nonviable, the historian then breaks his theory in a scrupulously delineated "political interest."19 If, on the other hand, the restoration of the subaltern's subject-position in history is seen by the historian as the establishment of an inalienable and final truth of things, then any emphasis on sovereignty, consistency, and logic will, as I have suggested above, inevitably objectify the subaltern and be caught in the game of knowledge as power. Even if the discursivity of history is seen as a fortgesetzte Zeichenkette, a restorative genealogy cannot be undertaken without the strategic blindness that will entangle the genealogist in the chain. Seeing this, Foucault in 1971 recommended the "historical sense," much like a newscaster's persistently revised daily bulletin, in the place of the arrogance of a successful genealogy. 20 It is in this spirit that I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times.

What good does such a reinscription do? It acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic. It is a hard lesson to learn, but not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice."

p. 214: "Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest. This would put them in line with the Marx who locates fetishization, the ideological determination of the "concrete," and spins the narrative of the development of the moneyform; with the Nietzsche who offers us genealogy in place of historiography, the Foucault who plots the construction of a "counter-memory," the Barthes of semiotrophy, and the Derrida of "affirmative deconstruction." This would allow them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible.

p.213:"I am progressively inclined, then, to read the retrieval of subaltern consciousness as the charting of what in poststructuralist language would be called the subaltern subject-effect.15 A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. (Each of these strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven of many strands.) Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness symptomatically requires a continuous and homogeneous cause for this effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject. This latter is, then, the effect of an effect, and its positing a metalepsis, or the substitution of an effect for a cause."

p. 212-213: "Another note in the counterpoint deconstructing the metaphysics of consciousness in these texts is provided by the reiterated fact that it is only the texts of counterinsurgency or elite documentation that give us the news of the consciousness of the subaltern...Yet the language seems also to be straining to acknowledge that the subaltern's view, will, presence, can be no more than a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of reading. It cannot be recovered; "it will probably never be recovered."

Once again, in the work of this group, what had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness, though the elite profess otherwise. This might seem preposterous at first glance. A double take is in order. I will propose it in closing this section of my paper."

p. 210-211:" It is the force of a crisis that operates functional displacements in discursive fields. In my reading of the volumes of Subaltern Studies, this critical force or bringing-to-crisis can be located in the energy of the questioning of humanism in the post-Nietzschean sector of Western European structuralism, for our group Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and a certain Levi-Strauss. These structuralists question humanism by exposing its hero—the sovereign subject as author, the subject of authority, legitimacy, and power. There is an affinity between the imperialist subject and the subject of humanism. Yet the crisis of anti-humanism—like all crises—does not move our collective "fully." The rupture shows itself to be also a repetition. The collective falls back upon notions of consciousness-as-agent, totality, and culturalism that are discontinuous with the critique of humanism. They seem unaware of the historico-political provenance of their various Western "collaborators." Vygotsky and Lotman, Victor Turner and Levi-Strauss, Evans-Prichard and Hindess and Hirst can, for them, fuel the same fire as Foucault and Barthes. Since one cannot accuse this group of the eclecticism of the supermarket consumer, one must see in their practice a repetition of as well as a rupture from the colonial predicament: the transactional quality of interconflicting metropolitan sources often eludes the (post)colonial intellectual."

p. 210: "The group, as we have seen, tracks failures in attempts to displace discursive fields. A deconstructive approach would bring into focus the fact that they are themselves engaged in an attempt at displacing discursive fields, that they themselves "fail" (in the general sense) for reasons as "historical" as those they adduce for the heterogeneous agents they study; and it would attempt to forge a practice that would take this into account. Otherwise, if they were to refuse to acknowledge the implications of their own line of work because that would be politically incorrect, they would, willy-nilly, "insidiously objectify" the subaltern (2, 262), control him through knowledge even as they restore versions of causality and self-determination to him (2, 30), become complicit, in their desire for totality (and therefore totalization) (3, 317), with a "law [that] assign[s] a[n] undifferentiated [proper] name" (EAP, 159) to "the subaltern as such."