"One message, all the time and in every way":1 Spatial subjectivities and pedagogies of citizenship. Issue 1 (1st January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: El-Sherif, Lucy; Sinke, Mark
• Is Part Of: Curriculum inquiry. Volume 48:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 35
• Page End: 52
• Publication Date: 2018-01-01
• Subjects: Critical theory -- pedagogical orientations -- socio-political conditions -- narrative methods; Education -- Curricula -- Periodicals; 375.0005
• DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2017.1409590
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0362-6784

Abstract

ABSTRACT: What are the pedagogical encounters through which we learn about hierarchies of citizenship and the positions to which we belong in a nation? In this article, we seek to answer this question by examining the ways Muslim and non-Muslim bodies are spatially related to the settler nation-state of Canada, to reveal how outsider subjectivities are constructed and maintained. We articulate the ways spatiality and subjectivity are intertwined with how normative and non-normative citizenship is learned. This relationship is examined through the events of the Parliament Hill shooting in Ottawa in 2014, and the subsequent state funeral held in the city where the authors live. We argue that these events were explicitly pedagogical and demonstrate the ways spatial subjectivities are produced along the racial lines of the nation. We trace how spatiality and subjectivity are interwoven in conceptions of Canadian citizenship, how these relationships prioritize the maintenance of a normative white settler citizenship identity, and we highlight this process in the pedagogical nature of the War Memorial and the subjectivity it calls forth. We define what we see as pedagogies of citizenship and analyse the subsequent state funeral and procession through our own lived experiences of the funeral's spatial imperative of subjectivity. We take up how the funeral as pedagogy asserted explicit Anglo-colonial power and its necessary constructs of embodied emplacement and settler futurity. Throughout, we consider how Anglo-dominance rests on multiple oppressions.