Uncertainty or Indeterminacy? Reconfiguring Curriculum through Agential Realism

Abstract

Understanding how indeterminacy is different from uncertainty is crucial to posthumanism and has major implications for reconfiguring curriculum. Uncertainty has to do with epistemology, about not knowing whether a state of affairs is or is not; for instance, one would not know whether something is here or there, now or then. Indeterminacy, however, is ontological and eschews the idea of individually existing determinate entities, proposing instead phenomena-in-their-becoming and a radically open relating of the world. Karen Barad, a feminist queer theorist, uses Niels Bohr’s quantum physics to show how atoms possess an inherent indeterminism or lack of identity in space and time. Indeterminacy is thus an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of being and non-being. Furthermore, neither space nor time are predetermined givens, but come into being intra-actively through the emergence of phenomena. This article shows how an understanding of space/time indeterminacy is important for thinking otherwise in curriculum studies.

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