Surviving to Dream/Dreaming to Survive
In a state of unbelonging
disgust, disdain, disavowal
A conditional existence
pending acceptance
pending inclusion
pending, pending, pending
healing
heeling
please wait…
Conditions and terms apply
Unless
within a state of unbelonging
imaginings, of a different they, you, I, and us
can tingle at the edges
uncertainly tethered
necessarily tethered and untethered
haunted by (im)possibilities
In between both nowhere and somewhere
Dreaming of an elsewhere
Introduction
As a practicing elementary school teacher, I understand myself as embedded in a set of educational policies and practices that claim to be committed to inclusion but actually sustain processes of conditional inclusion or outright exclusion. I often wonder about how to substantively contribute to transforming a system that has demonstrated time and time again that it is not interested in transformation as much as it is interested in (re)forming iterations of itself that continue to ensure that disability and madness are representative forms of embodied or socio-cultural difference that disproportionately experience various states of unbelonging. Beyond the overwhelming set of research studies that continue to share how students, parents/caregivers and educators experience schools as discriminatory, inaccessible and even hostile environments, my own experiences working with disabled children and their families attest to how schools are encountered as sites of exclusion and unbelonging.1 Sometimes because of being mired in these experiences, I do admit to also experiencing a sense of hopelessness when more of the same exclusions continue to be reproduced. My experiences within institutional structures, policies, and procedures that I inhabit at times appear to be not only insurmountable, but unrelenting in their reproduction of more of the same injustices.
Yet, I also remain hopeful. This hope that real transformation towards practices of substantive inclusion often arise in moments when dreaming of an elsewhere becomes unexpectedly manifested in the middle of teaching and learning with disabled children. They are transient, ephemeral glimmers of what might be that often disrupt the status quo of what is. I have come to think of these as moments of Mad Dreaming with SF.2 In this paper, I offer Mad Dreaming with SF as a contribution to practices of counter-storytelling within mad studies and critical disability studies (CDS) with the understanding that this approach to counter-storytelling is also informed by decolonial studies, Black feminist thought, and posthumanism. By drawing upon an eclectic set of scholarly work, my approach to sociological inquiry, theorizing and interpretation is also deeply connected to my elementary public school teaching experiences. By teaching in Toronto which is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. I have learned with and from racially, culturally, religiously, and linguistically diverse colleagues, students, parents/caregivers whose practices of identification also intersect with disability, madness, class and gender. In other words, my counter-storytelling practice of Mad Dreaming with SF hinges on cultivating interconnections between embodied and socio-cultural differences.
This is important because as a counter-storytelling practice, Mad Dreaming with SF seeks to counter, contest, and question the role of neoliberalism in co-constituting schooling practices of conditional inclusion or outright exclusion. Based on my readings across several critical disciplines, I define neoliberalism as the most recent iteration of western colonialism because it continues to reproduce and co-constitute differential access and inclusion based on colonial categorizations of race, gender, class, disability, sanity, sexual orientation, and religious and ethnic affiliations. By drawing upon diverse scholarship, one of the aims of Mad Dreaming with SF is to break with and away from the injustice of western colonial logics. Similarly, Mad Dreaming with SF can also be understood as an invitation to transform our social relations and our teaching and learning relations for the purpose of generating space and time to dream otherwise with and for each other.
This article is comprised of three parts. The first section will focus on situating Mad Dreaming with SF within a set of critical discourses that inform how it operates as a practice of counter storytelling. By linking everyday embodied experiences with a sociological mode of inquiry that survives and thrives through embracing relations to madness and disability, I also explore how dreaming of an elsewhere entails breaking with and from the current neoliberal ethos and its co-constitution of discriminations and exclusion. In the second section, I focus on linking my interest in mad dreaming to my own experiences with inhabiting developmentalist logics as an elementary public-school teacher in Toronto, Canada. This portion of the article seeks to contest the role of developmentalism in shaping discourses and pedagogical practices. By focusing on the contributions of critical scholarship from within the fields of mad studies and CDS, one of the purposes in this section is to disrupt the power imbalances sustained by the child-adult binary.3 Similarly, by sharing an example from my own teaching experiences with “Joe,” this section also seeks to consider how children need time, space, and opportunities for mad dreaming, because they too experience the injustices of the current neoliberal hegemony. The third section explores the potentialities of mad dreaming through the SF of string figures, speculative fiction, or science fiction.4 In each section, I consider how mad dreaming might be enacted as a necessary strategy of survival. Throughout, my goal is to explore and critically examine how mad dreaming is neither frivolous nor extraneous but rather necessary for the cultivation of creative spaces for both children and adults. I suggest that mad dreaming with SF is one way out of current states of unbelonging as generated by iterations of western colonial onto-epistemological structures while also seeking to focus on creating new worlds (hopefully more socially just worlds) to inhabit with each other.
What is Mad Dreaming with SF?
As a counter-storytelling practice that seeks to contest neoliberalism while also contributing to reimagining our relations with each other, Mad Dreaming with SF in part draws upon Donna Haraway’s concept of string figures.5 In desiring communities that embrace mad and disabled children, youth and adults, mad dreaming with SF seeks to contest the hyper individualism of neoliberalism. As Haraway states: “bounded individualism in its many flavours in science, politics and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or in any other way.”6 This insight can be linked to the embodied and relational practices cultivated in community by several mad, disabled, and crip scholars because it attends to how the knowledge we make and share occurs in between us.7 Thus, the SF part of mad dreaming with SF is about attending to and focusing on the frail, tenuous, and often fractious bonds between you and I and us that are simultaneously vital to while also threatening our very survival.8
For instance, CDS scholar Petra Kuppers draws upon Haraway’s work to inform embodied storytelling via art, dance, drama, and playing with figures in her disabled care collective.9 Kuppers considers the importance of “engaging in art/life practice to sustain ourselves as a chosen web.”10 In another example of outlining a method of “fracturing and falling apart,” Alison Spurgas refers to the importance of “radical care” in community that refuses the neoliberal predilection to “isolate, individualize… and victim blame.”11 As an elementary school educator these kinds of examples of different ways of inhabiting each other’s lives offer hope of what might be possible when we commit ourselves to unlearning in ways that are “mad positive” and “includes mad-identified and non-identified people alike.”12 When taken together these two representative examples show how crip, disabled, and mad scholars are already enacting and inhabiting other ways of teaching, learning, and living together while also contesting the current status quo.
Thus string figuring in all it modes of cultivating embodied relations through differences through speculative fiction, speculative futures, and science fiction entail foregrounding social relations while also contesting the hyper individualism of neoliberalism.13 It is important to cultivate mad dreaming with SF as a counter storytelling praxis in ways that refuse to reproduce the abuses of power synonymous with western colonialism and its current neoliberal iteration. For me as an elementary school educator this in part means critically examining the role of developmentalism as a helpmate that works to reproduce western colonial logics. Dian Million’s work serves as a reminder that “theory may also colonize.”14 An example, that is of particular interest here, is the colonizing role of the theory of developmentalism.15 Indeed, as I will explore further in the upcoming section, developmentalism and its utopic promise of arriving at a “fully developed” stage, has played a pivotal role in tactics and practices of conditional inclusion or outright exclusion. In this sense, “it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what stories tell stories.”16
In exploring mad dreaming with “String Figures (SF),” Mad dreaming with SF desires to reimagine our social connections through a necessary tethering of our knowledge making processes to the tenuous, uncertain and fractious bonds between us.17 Thus, another key aim of mad dreaming is not to avoid the troubles of injustice but to sit in the middle of them, confront them and remain haunted by them in ways that seek to disrupt and avoid their future reproductions. As I will further elaborate, mad dreaming with SF rejects the western colonial “problem-solution dialectic” and its teleological utopic (dystopic) vision of infinite development and progress.18 In so doing I seek to contest that the only future possible is one that promises more of the same unjust practices.19
For Black feminist Audre Lorde as well as Indigenous scholar Dian Million, dreaming, poetry writing, storytelling, theorizing, and critical thinking are distinct yet interconnected tactics and strategies for understanding ourselves and each other in ways that offer opportunities to reimagine what we might mean to each other outside of the strictures of western colonial logics.20 Their respective contributions are relevant and salient to a counter-storytelling practice of Mad dreaming with SF because their work contests the common assumption within western colonialism that dreams are frivolous and indeed extraneous to a focus on sustaining and reproducing neoliberalism.
One of the main functions of schools is to prepare children and youth to labor in the neoliberal economy.21 One of the implications of such an orientation to learning is the excessive focus on task completion that coincides with practices of assessment, monitoring, and surveillance. Within this scheme, dreaming in the classroom is dismissed and relegated to small, transitory, fleeting moments and experiences between students and their educators. As an educator who dreams of an elsewhere, I often wonder what would happen if time and space were intentionally cultivated to foster the possibilities within our dreams. What if you and I and us have already dreamed our way out of western colonialism’s current iteration of injustices and merely dismissed it? What might happen if we understood our dreams as bridges to other worlds that we do not yet know how to name but can feel through our dreaming?22 What if dreaming was cultivated as a counter storytelling praxis aimed at disrupting the developmentalist myth that disabled and mad children, youth, and adults are not yet ready to participate in practices of knowledge making and sharing?
Black feminist Audre Lorde and Indigenous scholar Dian Million write respectively that:
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence… Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock of experience of our daily lives… Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.23
Dreaming to me is the effort to make sense of relations in the worlds we live, dreaming and empathizing our relations with past and present and the future without the boundaries of linear time. Dreaming is a communicative sacred activity. Dreaming often allows us to creatively sidestep all the neat little boxes that obscure larger relations and syntheses of imagination. I also believe that dreaming, theory, narrative and critical thinking are not exclusive of each other. They form different ways of knowing, and I will ask that we might imagine them as uneasy relations and alliances that may acknowledge inclusion while we call for respecting necessary boundaries.24
I quote both Black feminist Audre Lorde as well as Indigenous scholar Dian Million at length for the purposes of offering an entry point into understanding mad dreaming with SF as a vital and necessary everyday practice. Both Lorde and Million also remind us that dreaming has operated and operates outside of western colonial linear models of time in ways that facilitate new ways of understanding and being in community with each other.25 This is significant because dreaming is situated within the embodied ways in which we inhabit our lives and thus is accessible as a tool that can transform our world. Mad dreaming with SF posits that “dreaming is a communicative sacred activity.”26 This means that we have a responsibility to each other and the inescapable bonds between us to dream with and for each other. In this sense the dreaming part of enacting a counter-storytelling practice of Mad Dreaming with SF, engages with dreaming as integral to both surviving and thriving in what Michelle Fine has referred to as “revolting times.”27 Neoliberal times are indeed revolting for the ways in which they have so deeply infiltrated schooling practices that claim to be inclusive even as practices of categorizing and labeling children and youth as problems that require surveillance and monitoring continue unbated.28 In this sense, dreaming of an elsewhere within the context of embracing madness, disability, and all embodied differences, seems both necessary and vital to the work of not only questioning and contesting the status quo but also reimagining the conditions of our social relations.
As part of completing my doctoral studies, I began engaging with CDS and other critical fields of inquiry. Exploring, critically examining, and linking together different modes of social inquiry has helped me to question and rethink what I thought I knew about teaching and learning. My recent exploration and engagement in mad studies has only deepened my interest in dreaming of elsewhere because mad studies offers hope that it is possible to do more than just survive injustice but also contribute to a reimagining of our relations. For example, Jess Waggoner revisits the past and contests the erasure of Black women from the historical archive of madness in ways that also offer a needed critique of the practices of privileging heteronormative whiteness and specifically white femininities.29 Elsewhere, Jess Whatcott offers a critical analysis of Octavia Butler’s science fiction while contending that Butler’s work showcases the import of interdependent communities of disabled and mad people.30 Spurgas’ work also contests neoliberal individualism through focusing on mad and disabled community building in the present as integral to surviving the injustices of the contemporary moment.31 Kuppers’ work showcases embodied storytelling practices within her chosen disability community as a way to cultivate accessibility and inclusion despite persistent socio-cultural exclusions.32 Taken together these examples foreground the experiences of mad and disabled people. Similarly, by focusing on relations with disability and madness as integral to dreaming in ways that foreground our interdependencies, they disrupt a “problem-solution dialectic” and its teleological utopic (dystopic) vision of infinite development and progress.33 In other words, whether it is Waggoner’s and Spurgas’ refusal to accept the ways things are in the past and present, or Whatcott’s engagement in SF in ways that embrace embodied differences into speculative futures, or Kuppers’ present cultivation of community through Haraway’s conception of SF, mad dreaming entails a commitment to cultivating community.
In sum, Mad dreaming with SF links together concepts and ideas from critical disciplines such as Black feminist thought, decolonial studies, mad studies, CDS, and posthumanism for the purposes of contesting western colonialism and its reiterations. Mad dreaming with SF disputes the neoliberal aspiration for boundless progress and development that hinges on the reproduction of problem people that are always and already envisioned as excluded from the future. To contest this injustice, Mad Dreaming with SF enacts counter-storytelling practices that attend to the responsibility we have to each other and the inescapable bonds between us to dream with and for each other through and amid madness, disability, and all embodied differences. Thus, the Mad part of Mad Dreaming with SF is vital to dreaming of an elsewhere because it means focusing on “the flows that operate between concepts and ideas” through processes that are non-linear and multi-directional.34 Inhabiting time and space with each other in nonlinear ways wherein we might attend to our relationships to madness and disability, as well as other embodied differences, is also a refusal to ignore past and present injustices. As a medium where power flows multi-directionally in space and time, Mad Dreaming with SF must also “name the violence mad people have experienced under the guise of help.”35 The field of education and the teaching profession that I have devoted my entire adult life to are synonymous with representing their work as helpful even as they sustain and perpetuate harms, discrimination, and exclusions. In the following section, I examine some of the ways mad studies, CDS, and Mad Dreaming with SF have invited me to contest and question the rhetoric of “help” often used by educators even as the concept remains unhelpful and unsupportive of children and youth diagnosed or labeled as disabled.
Contesting Developmentalism Through Mad Studies, CDS, and Mad Dreaming with SF
Untethering from Developmentalism
Developmentalism, and all its attendant bureaucracies, assessment tools, and practices, is a myth or story we tell ourselves that has not served the best interests of most children and adults that inhabit it. Hinging upon promulgating the myths of liberal and neoliberal independence, as well as the myth of normality, there are numerous critiques of developmentalism.36 For the purposes of exploring how mad dreaming with SF is needed as a method of counter storytelling, this section focuses on examining the aspects of developmentalism that function as a teleological utopia intended to sustain a dystopia of injustices for most humans.37 Put differently, one of the reasons developmentalism has had and continues to have potent staying power is due to its promise of a better tomorrow that never quite arrives.38
To be labeled and categorized as a problem child, problem adult, problem community, or problematic nation is also to be understood as underdeveloped or incapable of adhering to the strictures of western colonial normative development.39 Through calls for individual responsibility to manage, rehabilitate, or cure, being labeled as a problem also invariably means being linked to a solution or set of solutions intended to straighten out those who do not adhere to normative standards.40 For those not already counted as developed, inclusion is always and already conditional and contingent upon moving toward the reproduction of a normative future without problems and problem people.41 In this sense, developmentalism and its promise of a better tomorrow can be understood as instrumental in sustaining and reproducing practices of exclusion for disabled and mad people who are always and already excluded from any imagined future.42
My interest in examining the outsized role of developmentalism in shaping curriculum, assessments, and relationships between teachers and students can be understood as inextricably linked to my work as an elementary public-school teacher. Sticking with developmentalism promises children, families, and teachers alike a problem-free future that never arrives because developmentalism requires and expects an ongoing commitment to identifying, monitoring, and diagnosing problem children. Children, as the scholarship of Hunter Knight and China Mills and Brenda Lefrançois point out, are opposed to adults in the binary logics of western colonialism and subsequently deemed as not fully human but developing into being fully human.43 Since schools are tasked with the preparation of children and youth to be productive as members of the future workforce, this means that as a practical everyday reality, much of the school day is preoccupied with practices of assessment and surveillance of children and youth. Most practices of assessment are enacted for the purposes of diagnosing and managing prospective problems that might impede progress towards the better future developmentalism promises. Within developmentalism, the prospect of being counted as a full member of the human category creates the conditions for contingency, precarity, and uncertainty because each individual must work to either achieve this status or maintain this status and the rights accrued within this category, once achieved. Both historically and within our own contemporary moment this has meant that children, youth, and adults experience discrimination and exclusion by being read as different from the norm due to their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and sanity.44
What does it mean to be part of and embedded in an education system that perpetuates such injustices through the false promises of progress towards a better, supposedly problem-free, tomorrow? Or as Athanasiou provocatively asks: “In what ways, then, might our critical epistemologies—operating necessarily from the inside and hopefully from the limit—induce potentialities for ‘our times’ despite and against the power apparatuses that organize the present and future?”45 In the act of inhabiting an educational structure that generates and sustains the conditions for exclusion, discrimination and injustices, I have found mad studies and CDS particularly supportive of my own process of unlearning and subsequently seeking to contest and question the myth of a better tomorrow that developmentalism promises. In other words, mad studies and CDS along with other critical discourses have invited me to dream otherwise by also inviting me to confront and question the role of developmentalism in co-constituting the conditions for social injustice.
According to Sara Snyder and colleagues: “Mad Studies offers a meta curriculum of unlearning. By unlearning we mean questioning what we think we already know and making room for multiple ways of knowing.”46 One of the ways mad studies and CDS have supported my journey of unlearning is through critical work that examines unjust relations of power and their role in reproducing sanist and ableist practices. For example, Anne McGuire’s recent analysis of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) demonstrates that even as the DSM has been revised and expanded it remains “a cultural artifact with much to teach us about the social, historical and political conditions rendering it intelligible as a means of understanding the mind and its problems.”47 Here McGuire contests the supposed representation of the authoritative neutrality of the DSM in a manner that reminds readers it is indeed another problematic and unjust story we choose to tell ourselves about each other. As an elementary school teacher who has read countless psychological assessments, the insights from both McGuire and Snyder et al, suggest that it is the assessments, and the representative authority ascribed to practices of labeling children as problems, that are core problems. Meaning that all that seems to occur through the use of the DSM is the reproduction of the kinds of power imbalances that ensure an unjust future in the process of endlessly labeling and monitoring problem children, youth, and adults.
In contesting developmentalism and its attendant systems of management and assessment, mad studies and CDS also facilitate a critical examination of unidirectional flows of power in ways that demonstrate the importance of unlearning current hegemonic knowledge making practices. This ongoing work is vital to mad dreaming with SF because of the ways contesting unidirectional flows of power are inextricably linked to also contesting the hegemony of any single story to shape our understanding of each other and the world around us. Developmentalism is a story wherein children, youth, and adults labeled as problems are repeatedly told they are not yet ready to fully participate in decisions that shape their own lives.48 Both the work of Mills and Lefrançois and Knight show how developmentalism is not a neutral theory but rather is deeply entangled in promulgating the racist, classist, sanist, ableist, and sexist logics wherein the final stage of development, as well as “the ultimate and highest stage was the rational space of White Western masculinity.”49 Mills and Lefrançois state: “Colonial logics intersect with medical and psychiatric logics that enable not just the marking of certain individual bodies as sub-human but also the global categorizing of whole groups of people as being undeveloped, underdeveloped and/or wrongly developed.”50
These insights from the historical analyses of both Knight and Mills and Lefrançois further demonstrate that the co-constituted linear models of time and developmentalism ensure the reproduction of unjust unidirectional flows of power that aim to sustain the privileged position of heteronormative middle class white masculinity in a manner that hinges on the exclusion of most humans. For children, and in particular for children labeled as disabled or mad, this means that they have been the object of assessments; observations from the view of adults authorized to make knowledge claims and representations. This means that children who differentially experience injustice due to their age, gender, class, race, or disability have little to no input into the knowledges that are made and shared about them. In this sense, a component part of contesting unidirectional flows of power and the kinds of knowledges produced within them, should also involve children, and in particular children labeled as problems.
Adhering to developmentalism indeed ensures the reproduction of problem people through cycles of diagnosis and monitoring in a manner that also ensures the conditional inclusion or outright exclusion of disabled and mad people. This in turn reproduces unidirectional unbalanced flows of power that privilege and hegemonize forms of knowledge production by adults read as able and capable to represent the lives and experiences of children as well as disabled and mad adults read as unfit to represent themselves. Yet, collective activism and creative works within the fields of mad studies and CDS, as well as others, have also contested these injustices in ways that have invited me as an elementary school educator to engage in an unlearning of the hegemony of developmentalism.
Similarly, in this process of unlearning I have also learned to attend more closely to the ways in which children labeled as disabled or mad have a great deal to contribute to reimagining conceptions of childhood and what it means to teach and learn in ways that refuse to reproduce unjust power imbalances. For example, while reading about the ways in which mad studies can be understood as a meta-curriculum that aims to facilitate “multiple ways of knowing,” I could not help but both to critically reflect upon and also speculate about how such a praxis of unlearning might have made a difference in the life of one of my former students.51 Before I share a little bit about how my reflections and speculations have been facilitated by mad studies as meta curriculum, I want to take a moment to point out how engaging in the work of mad dreaming with SF operates as a storytelling practice that counters the hegemony of developmentalism. Through focusing our knowledge making and sharing practices on undoing developmentalist assumptions about the sequence of events, or skills that should be mastered at a given time by a given individual, mad dreaming with SF also seeks to bind each of us to understanding the everyday impacts of current exclusionary tactics and practices that developmentalism co-constitutes. In this sense, mad dreaming with SF operates as an ongoing praxis that untethers our collective reliance and dependence on the hegemony of developmentalism while also attending to the inescapable ties that bind us to each other.
If, as Million states, “dreaming is a communicative sacred activity,” then creating spaces and opportunities for mad dreaming with SF entails contesting unbalanced relations of power through confronting injustice and reconfiguring our social bonds to each other.52 I have been reflecting and speculating a great deal about the vital role children and in particular children labeled as disabled or mad have played and might continue to play in this ongoing work. One of the reasons I do so is because of my own experiences with young children whose mad dreams have worked to dislodge and disrupt my own complacent adherence to developmentalism. I will share one of these examples by telling a little bit about my experiences teaching Joe who was eight years old and in grade 3 when I met him. By the age of eight, his circumstances and experiences in school were representative of what Snyder and colleagues refer to as the need to “recognize [how] mad students are systemically discriminated against while also considering other forms of structural marginalization students navigate.”53 I wish I had known then what I have since come to appreciate about teaching and learning through making space for mad dreaming with SF.
Unlearning and Learning with and from Mad Dreaming with SF
In retrospect I realize that Joe was one of many mad dreamers I have been fortunate to meet through my journey of unlearning. Though it has been several years since I have had any contact with Joe, I still feel haunted by him and his mad dreaming to this day. The task demands and regular intervals of assessment and monitoring of progress were an anathema to Joe’s curiosity. Joe desired to engage in posing questions about topics of interest to him while also pursuing his inclination to be outdoors rather than confined to the classroom. One of his passions was to watch for and seek out dragonflies in the school courtyard. He was fascinated by their seemingly abrupt lateral and zigzag movements in the air as he tried to trace their paths. He loved to look for insects hidden under rocks. He loved to watch the sky for birds in flight. He was his most animated and joyful in the courtyard, where much like the dragonflies he loved to follow, his ideas would flit and float, disappear and reappear.
Unlike the frustration and visible anger Joe experienced and expressed in the classroom, in the courtyard, Joe would tell stories about the dragonflies and birds that flew by. As he imagined being in conversation with the insects, dragonflies, and birds, Joe would slip into role playing in the courtyard with ease. These daily breaks from what he experienced as the untenable demands of the classroom, were periods of needed respite for Joe. They were also a break from and opportunity to explore learning unencumbered by curricular task demands to endlessly demonstrate his mastery of a given skill or concept. Though I did not realize it at the time, Joe was working at untethering himself from classroom demands that were unsupportive of his learning. Similarly, he was also tethering himself to the insects, the birds, and the dragonflies. Joe was in many respects “playing games of string figures.”54
By enacting a form of what I now recognize as mad dreaming with SF, he was surviving to dream and dreaming to survive. Due to the countless negative school experiences Joe had already had, which included a period of complete isolation from his peers in what one of his previous schools called a calm room, Joe did not associate the classroom with learning. Joe needed time and space in his day to dream the world otherwise than the way he found it. Of course, Joe is not the only one who has needed and continues to need and desire time and space to engage in the praxis of mad dreaming with SF. In retrospect I realize that I have had countless encounters with children as well as countless encounters with the theorizing of philosophers, scholars, and activists who might also be understood as engaging in a praxis of mad dreaming with SF. These encounters have helped me to question, contest, and resist my own complacency in inhabiting the status quo when this very status quo reproduces the conditions of uninhabitability. They have also helped me to question the role of developmentalism in helping iterations of western colonialism remain hegemonic.
As Lorde has articulated, poetic dreaming is necessary because it “lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”55 Inspired by Joe and countless other students, philosophers, scholars, and activists, the next section, will explore how a method of mad dreaming with SF can be understood as a counter storytelling practice aimed at embracing an entangled past, present, and future of disabled and mad embodied differences. In so doing, I consider how mad dreaming with SF might reimagine the potentialities of future worlds that embrace embodied differences while refusing past and present hegemonic abuses of power. Similarly, I focus on the SF part of mad dreaming. By engaging in speculative futures or a moment of science fiction, I also explore the potential of string figures to inform mad dreaming in ways that embrace the role of children and adults alike in a future not yet born.56
The Potential for Inclusive Futures: Mad Dreaming with SF
Mad Dreaming with SF
Coming together
Falling apart
States of unbelonging that are bound and unbound
Stop bossing me around
Stop pretending that you care
Stop watching me
Let me out of this place
I can feel the air on my face
I want to dream with you in this space
As a method that aims to build bridges towards inhabiting “multiple ways of knowing,” I posit that cultivating time and space for mad dreaming with SF holds fruitful possibilities for reconfiguring our relations to each other.57 This is a strategic and intentional invitation to embrace multiple perspectives while avoiding the hegemony of any single rendition of how knowledge might be made and shared between us. For instance, Million’s work serves as a reminder that western rights-based claims always already enact exclusions by deeming experiences and knowledge produced outside of this framework as “unrecognizable.”58 Million invites an engagement with narratives that are felt in embodied and everyday ways, and subsequently embedded in communal relations.59 In a distinct yet linked way, Haraway engages in her own SF work by envisioning a future where human and non-human forms of life live in symbiotic relations with each other as a way to ensure the survival of diverse embodiments.60 Here Haraway not only breaks away from the child-adult binary but also the kinds of binary logics that divide humans from other ways of living in a manner that also drives human abuses of power.61 While distinct, both Million and Haraway’s invitation to rethink our relations to each other can be linked through reimagining our futures with each other. Haraway and Million offer the potentialities in “constantly eluding frames and bringing our own knowing with us.”62 Through these entangled strands of analyses that draw from the past, present, and potential speculative futures, mad dreaming with SF seeks to enact the kinds of counter storytelling practices that refuse to reproduce the colonial logics of the past and present.
Currently, educational policies and practices are governed by the intertwined hegemonies of developmentalism and neoliberalism. Based on tenets that promulgate the unjust notion of pursuing individual success as measured by accumulation and consumption of material wealth, both developmentalist and neoliberal logics reproduce practices of conditional inclusion, outright exclusion, and discrimination. My former student Joe, labeled as disabled within a school system increasingly interested with metrics, assessment measures, and aggregating data sets, is one of countless students who has experienced and continues to experience schooling practices as unresponsive and even hostile to his needs, desires, hopes, and dreams. As a representative example, teachers in my local district are increasingly mandated to spend more time engaging in assessment.63 Program Policy Memorandum 168 (PPM 168) explicitly states that the purpose of newly (as of September 2024) implemented early screening tools are for the increased monitoring of, as well as for the collection of, more data on student progress and development.64 Through the continued privileging of adult forms of knowledge production, this so called new PPM is representative of an ongoing commitment to reproduce more of the same binary logics. This includes what Mills and Lefrançois have referred to as the ongoing project of “the psy-governance of childhood.”65 Similarly, the ongoing focus on accumulating more data about children’s development also contributes to excessive labelling and monitoring of children like Joe. Joe who was labeled and documented as a problem child from his earliest days in kindergarten represents what Knight refers to as the child “out-of-sync” with western colonial linear models of time.66 Put differently, as long as policy makers and educational leaders continue to reproduce knowledge in ways that reinforce current hegemonic norms, the same unjust practices of exclusion and discrimination will also continue to impact countless students like Joe who are deemed “out-of-sync” and labeled as problems.67
Since repeating current sclerotic forms of knowledge production merely reproduces more of the same injustices, my invitation to engage in mad dreaming with SF also aims to cultivate opportunities to unlearn the “problem-solution dialectic” at the heart of so much educational policy and practice.68 Inspired by Joe and countless unnamed students who have taught me the importance of unlearning as vital to thinking, experiencing, and relating to myself and others differently, I offer my own mad dream with SF. My vignette of science fiction or speculative fiction is inextricably shaped by and linked to my own “chosen web” of work in decolonial studies, posthumanism, CDS and mad studies scholarship. The SF I share here is a praxis of mad dreaming that imagines a time of collective survival while foregrounding that the only way out of injustice is with and through our relations with each other.
In this sense, through a method of mad dreaming with SF, I posit that the past and present practice of labeling people as problems and imposing solutions on people in the name of some “professed benevolence” is not only unsustainable and unjust but unconducive to the potentialities of a future that might hold the promise of inclusion.69 My mad dreaming with SF is entangled in losses that are necessarily inescapable and viscerally felt by both children and adults because I understand these losses as directly linked to abuses of power that have historically and presently reproduced themselves. I am not sure how, if or when these abuses of power might stop but I do like to imagine that at some point, they must stop. This kind of mad dreaming with SF directly contests developmentalist logics that often represent children as incapable of understanding, let alone contributing to how we might build worlds with each other through processes of making and sharing our knowledge, stories, and dreams. Thus, in the spirit of being between both nowhere and somewhere, I invite you to engage in the mad dreaming of a more socially just elsewhere.
Spring, 2240
This morning, three children joined our class as newcomers into our community. They arrived with their family a few days ago. According to fragments of some old books that have survived, family used to be determined at birth and the person you called mom used to be the person who gave birth to you. Now families are chosen largely by circumstances of caring and being cared for with each other. The children have arrived just in time for our weekly morning of activities dedicated to remembering the past and dreaming a different future together. We start by saying the name of a loved one lost in the most recent war. There have been so many losses for all of us that it is difficult to choose just the name of a single person. Both adults and children alike are encouraged to share. Some use their voices, some share a picture they have made, some cry or turn away because the losses are too painful to be named. There is no judgment here and no one is forced to do anything they do not want to do.
After the sharing of names, someone is selected to read a passage from one of the old books that turns up now and then. The passage chosen today is a list of what used to be called countries. The list ranks and compares the countries by size, population and what they produced. There is even a column counting the percentage of disabled people. This was from a time before the last big war that destroyed almost everything. Now countries do not exist, and no one really has any way of knowing their place of birth or origin. There are so few of us left and there are so many of us who are disabled or have disabled family members or friends, that taking time to count and compare seems not only odd and strange to us but unhelpful. We read these fragments from long ago as a way to remember how not to treat each other.
After the time of mourning and remembering, we dream. Some gather in small groups of three or four. Others prefer to work as partners or be alone with their own thoughts. The only rule during dream time is that we have to dream with and for each other in ways that ensure all of us can inhabit the present and the future with each other. Near our community, there is a toxic no go zone where in the time before old electronics decay and rot. It used to be that in the time before everyone had many electronic devices. We call this the age of Hyper Individualism. We have decided as a community that we do not wish to return to this era. We have decided to dream otherwise.