Palimpsests for reading politics and reconfiguring power within and beyond learning spaces

Abstract

Just after logging into the online meeting room, each of us—still joining from the comforts of our home office spaces following the shift there due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020—quickly moved past pleasantries. Ahead of diving into the task of threading together the four articles that constitute this issue, we shared reflections on the array of contemporary headlines and happenings that filled our social media feeds, blared across mainstream media, and occupied our thoughts on the first day of November 2022. From then-looming decisions from the Supreme Court of the United States about affirmative action to the just-announced decision for nearly all Ontario public schools to close amidst a breakdown in labour negotiations between education workers and Ontario’s Conservative government, we did not need to look far to see politics and power intersecting with education. Within regressive educational spaces, protest signs, picket lines, and human rights discussions are increasingly considered far “too political” for everyday classroom happenings, under the fallacy that schooling and curricula can and should remain “neutral” so as not to cause a further rupture in the fabric of society. Frequently framed as a protective measure, proponents of a cis-white-patriarchy and white supremacist settler-colonial status quo articulate their argument as one symbolic of maintaining a (nationalist) truth, particularly as related to identity and place. Conversely, as we have learned from the political work of Black, Indigenous, and trans communities, as well as others targeted by racial capitalist social formations, we know an alternative view of education suggests we must take “an overtly political orientation to teaching and learning” (Luke, 2014, p. 21). We understand the urgency of reading politics in everyday actions and communications to cultivate fertile ground for reconfiguring power and, ultimately, societal change. The authors of the four articles in this issue offer readers reflective insights, critical perspectives, and potential pathways for doing just that. Cumulatively, we read these four articles as emblematic of what Jon M. Wargo and colleagues in their article in this issue describe as “palimpsests for reading how power can be reconfigured for a more equitable social order and just future” (p. 566). Within each article, authors foreground and call for imagining “otherwise” as a necessity for educational and social justice, rather than simply a strategy for surviving the “narrow confines of schooling institutions” (Pham, this issue, p. 518). With progressives’ efforts