| Course Description |
Education is a social project of making futures. It is a field where people imagine selves and worlds to come
while navigating current constraints and past legacies. Even in the face of various crises that disrupt
educational systems globally, education is often understood as a crisis response and charged with the task of
forging alternative futures and driving social and economic progress.
In this course, we will interrogate the politics of crisis and futurity in education. First, we will explore how
notions of crisis are mobilized to define problems and solutions in education research and policy. In this
exploration, we will ask how histories and politics of domination along lines of race, class, gender, and other
social categories are articulated or silenced in discourses of educational crisis. We will attend to how crises
create both danger and opportunity by considering how they serve to justify violent, dispossessive restructuring
and how they lay bare structures of inequality in ways that generate collective action and transformation.
Next, we will Interrogate education’s futural orientations. We will probe familiar progress narratives and explore
what roles education plays in shaping how marginalized communities imagine and enact futures beyond the
status quo, attending to both its affordances and limitations. Throughout the course, we will draw on
speculative fiction and on scholarship in anthropology, Black studies, and comparative education to investigate
the politics of crisis and futurity in diverse educational contexts. We will engage study as speculative practice
through collaborative and independent exercises that invite us to develop praxes for just futures of education.
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