Obsidian badge unlocked: wrote and published a social science article from material 90% organized in Obsidian. I’m a few years in, and there’s certainly no going back now. Thanks to all the tips and insights from other Obsidian users.

I’m excited to teach The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey this week in my Critical Literacies and Communities class. This is a science fiction/horror/dystopian novel that takes place 20 years after The Breakdown of society due to a fungus that turns humans into zombies, or, somewhat euphemistically, “hungries” as they are called throughout the novel. (Spoilers below.) Why have I placed this novel in a class about critical literacies and communities, and why read it with a class full of aspiring educators?

The answers to these questions started forming in 2015 when I read the novel shortly after its publication.

The central relationship in the novel is between a teacher and student: Miss Justineau and Melanie. It’s usually a hard pass for me on books that center student-teacher relationships. They are often so far removed from the actual work of education and what teaching in schools looks like today. And so is this one. But in a different way. Melanie is a hungry. The back cover introduces her like this:

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointed at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.

Melanie is a hungry and Miss Justineau is a teacher in her “classroom” on a military base. The workers on the base have orders to study high functioning hungry children, like Melanie, for possible cures to the fungus. Studying them means collecting data on their cognitive and emotional responses to a simulated classroom setting. At least up until the lead scientist calls for a child hungry to dissect in her lab. Melanie is sweet, endearing, engaged, and all but passes for a normal child if it were not for the hunger to bite – yes, eat! – any human she might smell. Yet unlike the adult hungries in the outside world that have taken over, she has some capacity to recognize this urge, resist it, and remove herself from a situation where she might do the thing she would most regret: eat Miss Justineau. Of course, much of the action teeters on this edge, especially because Miss Justineau understands that Melanie is, indeed, the girl with all the gifts, and seeks to save her from the lead scientist’s plans.

That curriculum is so central to this world is one aspect that has me so interested to teach it. The curriculum given to the child hungries is from the pre-Breakdown world: fairy tales, Greek myths, and facts and figures about cities that have since fallen. Melanie’s cell is decorated with a picture of the Amazon rainforest and a kitten drinking from a saucer of milk. It’s an understatement to say that all of their textbooks are outdated. The curriculum around the child hungries is of a world that no longer exists. And they have no idea.

This context in the early part of the novel raises this question: how is curriculum equally outdated in classrooms today? What are we asking students to learn – to believe – that is of a world that no longer exists for them? I like these questions. I think about them a lot. And I want my classes to consider them too.

This question is brought to the fore when, as characteristic of the dystopian genre, the world constructed in the early part of the novel breaks down. In this case, the walls around the military base are breached and hungries swarm. Melanie, Miss Justineau, and three other characters with conflicting interests are thrust together into the beyond. For the first time, Melanie sees, smells, touches, and perceives the world as it is - in its horror and beauty - beyond the curriculum that constructed her reality in the classroom simulation. There are no kittens drinking from saucers of milk. There is no Amazon rainforest. The population of Birmingham is zero. Yet fragments of the classroom simulation curriculum continue showing up as she reconstructs her entire understanding of the world and what she is in it. How could they not? It’s all she has known.

The novel begins in a classroom, and it ends in a classroom. The penultimate classroom, however, is not a simulation like in the beginning. It’s Miss Justineau, Melanie, and a small group of hungry children - more feral than high-functioning like Melanie, but there is hope - gathered around a makeshift white board. They’ve accepted the new world that has begun, remade by a peculiar fungus, never to go back. They are students, and their teacher starts the lesson by writing the first letter of the alphabet on the board.

I struggle with the final scene. It’s teacher-centered. It’s direct instruction. It’s banking. The children (as we’ve come to accept them over the novel, no longer just hungries) are blank slates and empty receptacles. Paulo Freire would not be pleased. But herein lies the second question, and the second reason, I wanted to teach this novel: What should the education of these children look like on the cusp of this new world that is emerging before them?

This question is one introduced much earlier in the semester while studying visionary philosophy and organizing through the writings, recordings, and conversations of James and Grace Lee Boggs. The Boggses and comrades were thinking in context with post-1967 and post-industrialized Detroit. Central to their dialectical thinking is evolution of the human: a more human human – the phrase that shows up in their writing and is often used as a shorthand reference to the ontological commitments underwriting their theory of change. The Girl with All the Gifts ends at this point of emergence. The new world has begun. The (hungry) children will be the adults of this new world in which Miss Justineau and any other surviving adults cannot inhabit. What should education and learning look like?

I’m glad to be reading this novel as the class launches into the final third of the semester where we explore participatory approaches to learning. Participatory approaches and epistemologies have their own answers to this question. And the final scene of the novel invites us to answer the “what should” question through various educational approaches.

Abstract for audio paper The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole, in publication with Seismograf Peer.

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by “rejecting the solidity of a frame” (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged in the in-between of minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity, and “assembly of our obligations to one another” (2021, p. 8.)

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance takes the shape of a formless formation to explore integrity and wholeness among collectives that self-organize for radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about moral virtue but rather a collective, ontological state of being whole.

Guided by an ethic of emergence (brown 2017) and traditions of Black study (Harney and Moten 2013), we assembled members of three creative collectives for regular strategy, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine month period. These collectives are SOLHOT, Fire in Little Africa, and The Aadizookaan. We asked ourselves the following research question: how do these collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time?

These sessions generated a shared archive of sonic material for the not-yet (van Hesswijk et al. 2021): conversation recordings totaling over 20 hours, ritual scripts we wrote, original sound compositions, and more. From these materials, we composed borderless vignettes where voices and sounds converge, dissolve, pulse, and rupture in loving demand for the wholeness we will only find among one another.

Bibliography

brown, a. m. (2017) Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Brown, R.N., Smith, B.E., Robinson, J.L. and Garner, P.R. (2018) Doing digital wrongly. American Quarterly, 70(3), pp. 395-416.

Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013) The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

Ruiz, S. and Vourloumis, H. (2021) Formless formation: Vignettes for the end of this world. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

van Hesswijk, J., Hlavajova, M., and Rakes, R., eds. (2021) Toward the not-yet: Art as public practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Biographies

Emery Petchauer is most at home in intergeneration art, expression, and learning spaces where youth and adults make things together — especially beats, sounds, songs, and lots of noise. He plays the role of curator and conduit in these spaces, linking together the relational and material assets for teaching, learning, and living. A longtime turntablist and newer sound designer, he is a professor in the Department of English and Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

Ruth Nicole Brown is Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Brown grew up in Park Forest and Chicago Heights, IL nurtured by bold and determined practices of collective possibility. She continues to activate home truths and bring other’s to futures of radical creative power and praxis through Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective Brown founded in 2006 to celebrate Black girlhood by meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart.

In collaboration with Am’re Ford, Mark C. Francis II, Dr. Stevie Johnson, Sacramento Knoxx, Sandy Love, Jessica Robinson, Jacobi Ryan, and Dr. Blair Ebony Smith.

When Ruth Nicole and I brought the collectives together in our first Forms of Freedom exchange session, the first question we got was, “Do you think we can create together?” There was emphasis on the word together. Of course the answer was “Yes” (That’s that emergent, participatory design). But we couldn’t be together in the same space yet, because you know why.

A year later when the exchange sessions were finished and it was safer to travel, safer to be together, we brought everyone together-together. Like in person. This was the experiment of the People’s Sound Studio in NYC @ Teachers College. The idea was to create how the collectives create in the same space and invite the public in. Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths - Solhot & The Aadizookaan & Fire in Little Africa / The Space Program

The People’s Sound Studio also happened specifically in New York and at TC because Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz and Bettina Love said yes. Yes to the sounds, yes to the snacks, yes to the visitation. Holding space in Bettina’s abolition teaching seminar boosted the most radical idea seeded in the project: a proposition that formlessness itself is as an abolitionist strategy (that’s Ruiz & Vourloumis in Formless Formations).

We shared artistic creations from the project, and the response and conversation in the seminar pushed us outward and upward. It was energy that would help create the ensemble of movement frozen in space where it all now lives. What I mean is that there are sacred things we made as part of this project that we didn’t know should or needed to be public before that visit. That’s true of everything I made with our archive of shared sounds. More on those later.

Being there also showed us a contradiction running through this work. Here we are, calling this a “People’s Sound Studio,” inviting in the “public” to an elite, Ivy League space that’s a room inside a building inside another big ass building inside an ever-expanding zone of university sprawl. Some public. Boy are we silly sometimes.

That was a moment of levitation. When the contradiction you’re standing on drops out. You’re floating, levitating — as Kesho Scott explains (thanks for that podcast, Matt). It wasn’t a negation of our work. The levitation was a call to think about it differently. The differently we got to (or maybe this is more me) was the notion of passing through — all the ways we are passing through these institutions together. Passing though, romping through, and stomping through together. The People’s Sound Studio was a kind of passing through.