Is this the real life, is it just fantasy? DISCOVERING THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN THE EDUCATIONAL PRESENT

Saturday, November 19, 2016: 10:15 AM-12:00 PM

Delighted that our session was accepted for 115th Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, coming up in November 2016.

Session Abstract

As a contested locus for articulating our collective values and for imagining our relationship with the State, schools serve as spaces for producing and mediating fantasies of the past; and fantasies of the future.  From historical, nationalistic representations that erase a racialized past to nostalgia-laden fantasies of childhood, schools draw on and deploy “the past” in particular ways.  These articulations of “the past” are inscribed into the politics of the present and structure the field of experience as we experience it.  These debates, moreover, provide a window to core dilemmas at the heart of a society’s efforts to define itself at any particular historical moment.

At the same time, schools suture these nostalgic articulations of the past with fantasies of the future.  Dystopian fantasies of climate change, strategies for managing imagined future risks through market-driven “choice,” utopian visions of civic engagement, racialized configurations of aspiration, and nationalistic diatribes about the future of the State are all enacted in educational settings.

Drawing on a variety of frameworks and instantiations, papers in this session will interrogate our tacit presuppositions about the ways that schools can act to mediate temporality as made evident in fantasies about ourselves or our collectivities.