Presentation at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference London, 30 August to 1 September 2017

1. Curricula as contested and contesting
spaces: Geographies of longing,
resistance and (dis)comfort
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference
London, 30 August to 1 September 2017
Paul Prinsloo
University of South Africa (Unisa)
@14prinsp
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg

2. http://ideaspartnership.org/
@ESRC_IDEAS
#ESRCIDEAS

3. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in
this presentation. I therefore acknowledge the
original copyright and licensing regime of every
image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License

4. Alternative title:
A (dis)organised, stuttered reflection
on participating in the decolonisation
discourse as a white African male
Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg

5. Central to this presentation is the proposal
to consider the curriculum as an officialised
map, created and endorsed by those in the
cartographic office. This map presents not
only the official version of the past, but
also acts and is used as powerful tool to
shape the future.
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afrika_Map_1689.JPG

6. Maps not only visualise the inclusion and exclusion of
territories, but also present these inclusions/exclusions
as normalised and uncontested.
Image credit: https://fullfact.org/media/_versions/uk-border-passport-control-eu-
facebook_social_media.jpg

7. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
But there are also those who usurp, question,
vandalise/deface and contest these officialised
maps, borders and its monuments
Image credit: http://thedailyaztec.com/81659/news/presentation-explores-dangers-of-crossing-the-border/

8. By Paul Prinsloo (University of South Africa)
@14prinsp
Image credit first slide: http://connect.citizen.co.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2015/10/C2.jpg?81cf05
The ‘curriculum as contested space’
#RhodesMustFall #ScienceMustFall
#DecoloniseThe Curriculum

9. Page credit: http://ewn.co.za/2015/04/10/Rhodes-statue-removal-only-the-beginning

10. #ScienceMustFall
Page credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14

11. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
NBC News source credit: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-
news/christopher-columbus-statue-new-york-city-could-be-
considered-removal-n795316

12. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Page credit: http://all-monuments-must-fall.ghost.io/all-monuments-must-fall-a-syllabus/

13. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Page credit: https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f#.om5w2ivfq

14. Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
Overview of the presentation
• Situating myself in the discourse
• Five pointers for thinking about the
curriculum as contested and contesting
space
• Four discursive spaces for consideration
• (In)conclusions

15. Who am I? What/who gives me the
right to speak?
How do I as a 58 years old, white, gay male talk about and
participate in discourses re decolonising the
curriculum/knowledge?
How do I disentangle my tentative contribution from my
position of being a settler, having grown up in settler
communities, schools, and going to a settler university where
the language of tuition was a settler language, and where
people of displaced communities and their epistemologies were
marginalised and excluded?
(See Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013)

16. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
“What is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness, …to
acknowledge that one is inherently tied to
structures of domination and oppression, that
one is irrevocably on the wrong side?”
(Alcoff in Applebaum, 2010, p. 3)

17. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
How do we acknowledge our
own investments in
whiteness that “can obscure
how white people even with
the best intentions are
implicated in sustaining a
racially unjust system”?
(Applebaum, 2010, p. 10)
Whiteness as the Midas
touch…
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Midas_gold2.jpg

18. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
I therefore do not plead innocence, look for sympathy
or absolution or use this presentation as gesture of a
“false generosity” (Tuck & Fine, 2007, p. 154),
but as “coming clean, coming out … unforgetting”
(Tuck & Fine, 2007, p. 155).
(Also see Westcott, R. (2004). Witnessing whiteness: articulating race and the
"politics of style”. Borderlands 3(2). Retrieved from
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/westcott_witnessing.htm)

19. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Three options for writing about whiteness as
white person (Westcott, 2004)
• Writing as confessional – putting whiteness, again, in
the center of the experience
• Writing autobiographically, versus autobiographic
writing
• “Writing the dis-organised self” where I stutter,
collapse, and mumble (par. 43), where I open myself
to connections, to the not-yet. “It is, … a sortie, a way
forward’ (Westcott 2004, par. 49).
Westcott, R. (2004). Witnessing whiteness: articulating race and the "politics of style”.
Borderlands 3(2). Retrieved from
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/westcott_witnessing.htm)

20. Image credithttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fool%27s_Cap_Map_of_the_World.jpg
See Robert Thuerck July 16, 2013 –
http://www.sustainablediversity.com/?p=208
The Fool’s Cap Map of the World
(Oronteus Fineus 1580-1590)

21. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Any act of ‘mapping’ includes and excludes.
In the “battle of the maps” the person or power
who controlled the cartographic office was the most
powerful. All space had to be subordinated to “one
and only one, officially approved and state-
sponsored map”
(Bauman, 1998, p. 31)
1. The curriculum as map

22. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Where the cartographic office started off by
officialising space, as it were, by mapping it, maps
became important tools in the hands of the
powerful to “reshape” spaces.
“Before, it was the map which reflected and
recorded the shapes of the territory. Now, it was
the turn of the territory to become a reflection of
the map, to be raised to the level of orderly
transparency which the maps struggled to reach”
(Bauman, 1998, p. 35)

23. 2. Who creates these maps? Who are in the
cartographer’s office?
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cartographer_Pietro_Vesconte_(1318).jpg
• Faculty – gender, race, tenure/non-tenure, age,
onto-epistemologies, ideological positions
• Disciplines – what is (not) allowed
• Institutions – alignment with mission, vision
• Industry
• The [market]
• Accreditation and quality assurance regimes
• National governments
• Asymmetries in knowledge production –
North/South/developed/developing
• Academic journals
• Publishing houses
• Google/Social media

24. 3. The curriculum is a “contested space”
(Prinsloo, 2007) and “an arena of struggle” (Shay, 2015)
Image credit: Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele by Lieutenant Alfred Bastien, 1917, oil on canvas. Retrieved from,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_art

25. The ‘what’ of the curriculum is determined by those
who lay claim to retell the past
… and they will protect their claim at all cost
because their account of the past cements their
current and future interests and power
4. The curriculum as a battle for ownership of
the past and as a space to make a different
future possible

26. Source credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCUX3SWSFs
We are now here. We have come for you.
We are taking you back home

27. The ‘what’ of the
curriculum is
determined by those
who lay claim to
own the future …
… and they will
protect their claim at
all cost

28. Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Nitriensis,_f.20r_(Syriac_text).jpg
5. The curriculum as palimpsest

29. Soft-reform
space
Radical-reform space Beyond-reform space
Modernity’s life support Modernity’s palliative care
Recognitionofepistemologicalhegemony
Never have
been
happier,
healthier,
wealthier
Problems
addressed
through
personal
transformation
Problems
addressed
through
institutional
change
The game is awesome! Everyone can
win once we know the rules
The game is rigged, so if we
want to win we need to change
the rules
The game is harmful and
makes us immature, but we’re
stuck playing
Playing the game
does not make sense
Recognitionofontologicalhegemony
Recognitionofmetaphysicalentrapment
Racism
Capitalism
Colonialism
Heteropatriarchy
Nationalism
Race, capital,
heteropatriarchy
as modernity
(unfixable)
Alternatives
with
guarantees
Hacking
Hospicing
Other modes
of existence
based on
different
cosmologies
? ?
(Adapted from de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015,p. 25)
A way forward: Four spaces of enunciation

30. (In)conclusion
“The past is never closed, never
finished once and for all, but there is
no taking it back, setting time aright,
putting the world back on its axis.
There is no erasure finally”
(Barad, 2010, p. 264)

31. So where does this leave me as white, 58 year-
old male [etc.] cartographer?
• The modern global capitalist map of the world is
unsustainable and collapsing
• My/our language(s), maps, identities and sense-
making are inescapably connected to it
• “Hospicing enacts a willingness to learn enough of
(re)current mistakes of the current system in order to
make different mistakes in caring for the arrival of
something new”
de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015,p. 28)

32. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/empty-abandoned-messy-grunge-scene-863118/
Thank youPaul Prinsloo
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences,
Office number 3-15, Club 1, Hazelwood, P O Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
T: +27 (0) 82 3954 113 (mobile)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog: http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp