Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 2: Aporias of Complexity in Power, Politics and Methods in Education

The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of ＂the human＂. Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum, and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution, or action.

Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 2 brings creative sociopolitical research perspectives to flashpoints that emerge amid appeals to globalization, synoptic policy approaches, and new technologies - however defined. The chapters challenge prevailing notions of distance and difference, comparative philosophy, worlding practices, and contact zones. In the remaking of subjects, the unhoming of geopolitics, and new approaches to relationality, youth, and classrooms, complexities in preserving and questioning identity are laid bare and renovated. How technologies challenge and redefine racialization, engendering, and inter/nationalization are examined amid the reworking of oppression, success, well-being, politics, method, and power.

The volume will be beneficial for researchers seeking new approaches to education’s complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It is also a key text for post/graduate students and teachers interested in technological impact, globality, policymaking, and new ways of conducting research in contexts of digitalization and social media.

Bernadette Baker is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her work draws upon philosophy, history, comparative cosmology, and sociology as they intersect with curriculum studies, educational history, and philosophy, policies, and practices focused on well-being, new technologies, and the effects of power.

Antti Saariis Associate Professor (tenure track) at Tampere University Faculty of Education and Culture. Saari’s studies on educational research and governance have analyzed how transnational discourses of educational research and expert knowledge are translated to practices of evaluation, classroom management, and the use of instructional technology.

Liang Wang received her Ph.D. degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. She conducts transdisciplinary research in the transformation of education through digital technology, especially the digital recontouring of structural marginalization amid national and global education policy reform and technology-enhanced, anti-oppressive pedagogy.

Hannah Tavares is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her work explores the personal, relational, and diasporic, and the construction of geographical identity. Her practice draws from multiple cultural and disciplinary perspectives to examine the ambivalence and complexity of territorial and cultural boundaries. At the center of her work is the body, understood as a site of power and action.