Schooling entanglements: clipboards, write-ups, and resignation letters

Abstract

This article describes how schooling – the oppressive, disciplinary force of much U.S. education – is a lively actor, with the agency to change in response to efforts to resist it. Using an agential realist account, the article traces how humans, nonhumans, and discourses intra-act to shape the ongoing power of schooling. The posthumanist framing decenters the human and affords the possibility of acknowledging the agency of more than human actors – clipboards, write-ups, resignation letters, schooling discourses, racialized discourses – that may not be accounted for within humanist framings. In doing so, it also offers a unique perspective on how efforts to challenge or resist schooling must take a broader range of actors into account, from clipboards and handouts to adultism and racism.

Keywords:

• High school
• posthumanism
• schooling
• agential realism race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Discourse is performative, and not solely a human process of signifying (Barad, 2003). As Barad (2007) notes, “to think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking” (p. 146). Barad goes on to note how “discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe, the subject and object of knowledge practices” (p. 147). Furthermore, these discursive practices produce boundaries entangled with power; “But these enactions are not merely enactions by the human as such, as “the human” is always already the product of a constitutive discursive practice that needs to be accounted for in its materialization” (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 29). Thus, discourse is not solely of the human.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Albright

Thomas Albright is a Research Assistant Professor in Georgia State University’s College of Education and Human Development’s Department of Middle and Secondary Education. Albright’s research is steeped in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, youth participatory action research, posthumanism, postqualitative, critical qualitative methodologies, and social justice education. His research focuses on schooling, resistance, and school-university-community entanglements. Albright’s research at Georgia State is focused on a university, community, and school-based teacher residency to explore structures that support racial justice in teacher education. Current studies include exploring youth inquiry as a form of resistance to schooling, a posthumanism accounting of schooling, and examining issues of racial and social justice within teacher education.