Sense-Methods: Cultivating Intuition in the Face of Uncertain Futures

Abstract

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, through 2021, a group of curriculum designers met weekly to consider how they might respond to the ruptures the pandemic wrought to their curricular practices and what they needed from curriculum in the face of uncertain futures. They explored these questions through a variety of material, embodied practices—including a traveling box of curricular materials and habits of checking in with bodily sensations, emotions, and affective objects. I approach these practices as “sense-methods”, drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of how the body’s sense of time can be used as a technology for social cohesion—particularly forged against dominant temporalities—or control. Sense-methods make felt an affective, relational experience of temporality that is neither the uniform clock time, which orders so much of formal curricular documents nor the linear arc of progress that prevailed in public health discourses. I demonstrate how such sense-methods cultivate “intuition”, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s and Erin Manning’s Bergsonian use of that term. Intuition organizes such affective responses to the world: knowledge that lives amid the interface of the body meeting the social, material world. By considering how this group of curriculum theorists and designers marked and made time in ways counter to the dominant timelines of the pandemic and educational development, I argue that curriculum can prioritize such sensuous epistemologies. A curriculum concerned with how time makes itself felt finds wormholes—vulnerable, uncertain, and speculative—to other worlds.

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Location

Room 107

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Presentation (Open Access)

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Jun 9th, 3:15 PM Jun 9th, 4:30 PM

Sense-Methods: Cultivating Intuition in the Face of Uncertain Futures

Room 107

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, through 2021, a group of curriculum designers met weekly to consider how they might respond to the ruptures the pandemic wrought to their curricular practices and what they needed from curriculum in the face of uncertain futures. They explored these questions through a variety of material, embodied practices—including a traveling box of curricular materials and habits of checking in with bodily sensations, emotions, and affective objects. I approach these practices as “sense-methods”, drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of how the body’s sense of time can be used as a technology for social cohesion—particularly forged against dominant temporalities—or control. Sense-methods make felt an affective, relational experience of temporality that is neither the uniform clock time, which orders so much of formal curricular documents nor the linear arc of progress that prevailed in public health discourses. I demonstrate how such sense-methods cultivate “intuition”, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s and Erin Manning’s Bergsonian use of that term. Intuition organizes such affective responses to the world: knowledge that lives amid the interface of the body meeting the social, material world. By considering how this group of curriculum theorists and designers marked and made time in ways counter to the dominant timelines of the pandemic and educational development, I argue that curriculum can prioritize such sensuous epistemologies. A curriculum concerned with how time makes itself felt finds wormholes—vulnerable, uncertain, and speculative—to other worlds.