Selective Exclusion
Kevin Kumashiro and Karen Lewis both recount a story from The Miner's Canary of children playing a game where the boys kept losing to the girls. An elder, talking to a group of observant adults, suggested that they ask 3 questions:
- Who are the winners and the losers?
- Who makes the rules?
- What do the winners tell the loser so they keep playing?
Each of these questions help us understand regimes and strategies at play in games of truth. Unlike this described children’s game, I’m drawing on Michel Foucault to understand how such games create knowledge that have real, tangible, and material effects on humans. In these games of truth the stakes and consequences are quite high, and while they are not children’s games, they are games that we impose on children in our nation and across the world. This work witnesses the collective action of those who ask a 4th question.
What happens when the losers show the consequences of the game and work to make another reality?
I use observations and interviews to investigate and film as a form of inquiry to inform to explore (1) why educators, mothers and fathers, grandparents, young people, and community members have decided to act, (2) how they have come to act in collective and organized ways, (3) what strategies and structures they develop for their actions, and (4) what their experiences are in their collective acts of resistance.
Selective Exclusions
