Imposing order amidst disorder by making it up

I (Jenny) recently took a quick trip to Las Vegas, a city known for its “phantasmic brilliance” (Oswick & Keenoy, 2001, p. 217), and a city that offers “a limitless, timeless playground for the pursuit of all appetites and the opportunity to fulfill all dreams” (p. 217). Baudrillard (1988) referred to it as a giant hologram, a phantasy world where things appear real and then disappear as if they were created with a shimmering beam of light. It’s mostly, however, a place of spectacle and a city ruled by “compulsive consumption” (Oswick & Keenoy, 2001, p. 218) that is infused with “fiction, fantasy, and myth” (p. 225). In addition to the overly-abundant amounts of food, alcohol, sex, and money that visitors to Vegas can consume, cultural consumption of the ‘Other’ is also ubiquitous. I was struck by how utterly and unapologetically racist, for example, the casino slot machines are. Every other machine is themed around a racist or sexist depiction and centers “reductions, misrepresentations, stereotypes, and exoticism” (alexlayne, 2013, para 2) based on Orientalist, ‘indigenous’, ‘frontier’, ‘Celtic’, ‘mystic’, and other tropes. These machines are not just unapologetically racist – they revel in their racism, they are excited about their racism, the racist depictions seem to be exactly why the machines exist, or how they are explicitly designed to pull the customer in. As I wandered through the Vegas casinos, I was also struck at how utterly mundane and normal these machines are. Nobody seemed to care or even notice. Or, if they did notice, they laughed about it, as it’s all just part of the spectacled entertainment, the outrageousness of Vegas.

Of course, nobody goes to Vegas for this kind of cultural studies lesson, so it’s not really the venue to begin proselytizing to slots players [though just imagine it!]. This whole experience reminded me, though, of how early and often we are all subjected to what Ian Hacking describes as the “making-up of people.” Hacking describes how the human sciences (social sciences, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, anthropology, sociology) classify people as objects of inquiry, for many reasons – to control them, to help them, to organize them, to keep ‘us’ or ‘them’ safe, to change them, to understand them, or for the ‘good’ of the public. Via this process of study and classification, the human sciences create categories of people who didn’t previously exist, through their imperatives to count, quantify, create norms, correlate, medicalise, biologise, geneticise, normalize, and bureaucratize (Hacking, 2006, para 24) – the engines of discovery (para 23). López López provides some examples in her article (this issue) of some “kinds of people” who did not previously exist before the human sciences – including education – created them in order to control, regulate, and monitor them – such categories of people include “immigrant,” “ESL”, “struggling reader,” “Hispanic,” “Black,” “illegal,” and “indigenous.” The slot machines in Vegas operate through different mechanisms, but they, too, are involved in this broader process of creating people, or versions of people, that did not previously exist. While the exoticized and stereotyped people made up through the slot machines exist only in our fantasies [or for some of us our nightmares], these racist and sexist depictions affect real people, ultimately causing harm to those groups of people and contributing to how they are perceived, regulated, and monitored. In addition to the gaming and entertainment industries, we can very easily find other spaces, places, and enterprises where the making up of people occurs, including higher education, K-12 schooling, and other spaces where curriculum and pedagogy are enacted. The authors in this issue of JCP explore some of these places and processes, highlighting the various ways people – as well as disciplines, realms of study, and normative curricular and pedagogical ideas and practices – are created, and also reflect on how people, as Hacking states, act to resist those makings and reclaim their identities.

Sian Chapman, Peter Wright, and Robin Pascoe, in their Purpose, value, and practice in Western Australian schools: Understanding misalignment in arts learning, explore how arts learning in primary schools gets ‘made up’, as they seek to understand how both classroom-based and specialist art teachers in the elementary school context understand, interpret, and enact arts curriculum. They analyze how the idea and practice of “arts education” is shaped through situational and material contexts, professional cultures, and external cultures. Through lack of support from administration, lack of professional learning opportunities, and changing and oftentimes conflicting societal value placed on the arts and curricular policy towards how and when arts learning should be incorporated, arts education is often “made” to be unimportant, unvalued, or expendable. The authors explore how realigning purpose, value, and practice within arts curriculum implementation could help re-create a different kind of arts education experience for teachers and students that includes a “strengthened understanding of the place and role of the arts in schools” and how such a strong arts program could benefit young people participating in it.

Next, David Lewkowich’s Between wild thoughts and schoolboy essays: Psychoanalytic reverie and the dreamy, digressive subjects of writing in Robert Walser’s Fritz Kocher’s essays helps us think through how writing pedagogy is “made up” and how such pedagogy hinders the freedom of writers to express their affective desires, especially those located in those liminal indeterminate spaces on the “frontier of dreaming.” In this essay, Lewkowich points toward ways of challenging some of the dictates of literacy and writing pedagogies, including the “needs of school” that require “attention and order” and that seek to produce writers that are singular, self-assured, compliant, easily legible, expressible, memorable, and answerable. Throughout the essay, he focuses on how experiences of reverie – which he describes as spaces of “indeterminate identification between the essay and writer” – may provide some insight into how, by celebrating and sitting with “wild thought”, we can decenter the certain, clear tasks that are normally expected of writing students and can create writing experiences that, instead, encourage students to write with radical self-acceptance, through which they can embrace indeterminacy and seek to sustain rather than resolve the conflict inside us.

Refusing making, by Ligia López López, is an acknowledgement of and a critique of education as a site of making-up kinds of people – “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” “Black,” “refugee,” “special needs,” “ESL,” “citizens,” “illegal,” “white,” “boy,” “girl.” and even “student.” The social sciences and the humanities have offered both enabling and debilitating contributions towards the making-up of human kinds from the almost infinite spectrum of possibilities. The activities of these enterprises have created kinds of people that in a certain sense were not available before. Drawing from the specific case of Indigenous making-up in Guatemala, this article uses anthropology, its activities, aspirations, and reverberations in contemporary Guatemalan curriculum and pedagogy, as indicative of the effects and sustained ramifications of such making-up. Drawing upon Ian Hacking’s (2002) framework for making up people, this article proposes a study of difference and ‘race’ that charts and interrogates the knowledges, ‘experts,’ and institutions implicated in making up particular kinds of people and the effects that their making produces. Finally, and contrary to the popular folklore that “Indigenous” peoples in their imposed “uncivilized” ontology accepted the invader, this article draws conceptually and practically from Indigenous refusal. The making-up of people in education sorts, orders, and exploits and this colonial order must be refused. The article offers conceptual cues for refusal from which specific actions can be initiated in school pedagogies and curricula.

Drawing on the hit television series Transparent for their case study, Joseph Sweet and David Carlson’s This is me: Hidden pedagogy in the television series, Transparent considers the public pedagogy (Burdick & Sandlin, 2013) constituted in/by the show. In order to do this the authors conduct a discourse analysis (Gee, 2015, 2017) of two scenes that take place during the show’s first season. After interviewing six members of the show’s creative team they identified these two scenes as germane to the pedagogical aspirations of the show, and their analysis is the focus of the article. The authors analyze both the scenes and excerpts from the interview transcripts to critically examine the ways in which the television show may teach its audience about gender, sexual fluidity and trans* subjectivities – the “making-up” of people that could prove educative, enriching, and enlightening. The piece concludes with implications for how the show furthers the public Discourse regarding nonbinary, trans*, and gender creative individuals and what this public pedagogy can assist us to attend to and understand.

In the final article in this issue the HBO series, Westworld, is interrogated for how it challenges our notions about what might be real. Cathryn van Kessel and Kip Kline’s “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” Westworld, the murder of the real, and 21st century schooling looks at how the series provides a provoking platform for exploring an oft-neglected topic in contemporary education – the fetishization of technology and the murder of the real in Jean Baudrillard’ s sense. Current educational systems in Canada and the United States (and elsewhere) depend on an outmoded commitment to a world in which reality is assumed to be unobscured, but Westworld provides a provocative platform to challenge and renegotiate this assumption – to see how it’s made up. There are consequences for a world in which simulacra have displaced the real, and these are explored in the context of education and beyond to articulate a cogent and provocative vision.

As the articles in this issue of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy illustrate, making up people [and curricula, pedagogies, issues and problems] is central and in some ways essential to the project of education. For all of the ways that making up people can subject them to categorization, surveillance and normalization, it can also render them visible, intelligible, undeniable and a force to be reckoned with. These are “moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them” (Hacking, 2006, para 1) so we need a nuanced approach to dealing with making it all up. Who is served by the people we make up, and who is disadvantaged, oppressed and rendered silent and invisible? In the context of these five articles, we’ll leave it to you – you can make up your own mind.