Assemblages of nonreproductive spaces and some decolonial possibilities of schooling

Abstract

Over forty years ago Curriculum Inquiry published Jean Anyon’s (1981) “Social Class and School Knowledge.” Anyon (1981), influenced by contemporary theories of social reproduction and other curriculum scholarship, employed a Marxist class analysis to examine working, middle, affluent, and elite classes of schooling to understand how the standard curriculum reproduces itself in and through its subjects. What Anyon (1981) learned was that the contradictions within and between social groups reproduced ideology but also resisted its reproduction. Anyon (1981) called this resistance to ideological and class reproduction nonreproductive possibilities and knowledge that “facilitates fundamental transformation of ideologies and practices” (p. 31). Anyon’s (1981) foundational work meant that no longer could schooling be the great equalizer if more knowledge is not the answer to increasing economic access. Anyon’s work influenced generations of scholars to question the values and value of schooling from within its contradictions towards more equitable futures through social change, a tradition that Curriculum Inquiry remains invested in and that the articles in this issue continue to examine. One recent work that draws briefly on Anyon’s (1981) work with the same spirit of interrogating schooling and social transformation, but from a decolonial ethic, is la paperson’s (2017) A Third University is Possible. For la paperson (2017), the university is a worlding or “world-making” (p. xiv) formation that consists of three entities. The first world university aims to actualize imperial colonial futures of a settled world. The second world university aims to humanize and include the world it had formerly excluded, but in the end, remains a colonial institution but will a gentle touch (i.e., liberal multiculturalism or settler reconciliation). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1983), la paperson (2017) framed the third world university as a kind of desiring machine or a multiscalar assemblage driven by decolonial desires for Indigenous, Black, brown, and queer futures, the rematriation of land, and regenerating relationships broken through colonization and global, always racial, capitalism. Importantly, for la paperson (2017), colonial first and second world universities harbor antiand decolonial resistance. For example, drawing on postcolonial thinker and novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, la paperson (2017) reminded readers that British colonial schooling in Kenya harbored to-be revolutionaries and the critical eye of Thiong’o himself. In other words, the first and second world colonial universities “carry decolonial riders ... [with]