Curriculum Studies and Transnational Flows and Mobilities: Feminist Autobiographical Perspectives

Abstract

I here consider possible effects of global flows, transnational connections, and transcultural interactions on attempts to construct a worldwide curriculum studies field. These flows and mobilities loosen local populations from geographically constrained communities, connecting people and places around the globe in new and complex ways. Thus, they dramatically alter not only processes of curriculum construction and theorizing but also ways in which a worldwide curriculum studies field might be conceptualized and enacted. I argue that these flows and mobilities point to a necessary conceptualization of a worldwide curriculum studies field as always in the making. I briefly review perspectives on global flows and mobilities that currently circulate among a variety of academic disciplines. I then examine various feminists’ transnational, poststructural, postcolonial, and queer theorizing and practices in order to articulate tensions and possibilities for a worldwide curriculum studies field affected by transnational flows and mobilities. Particular feminist work especially draws attention to political, social, economic, and environmental biases and injustices that flows and mobilities have shaped and sustained. I argue that these feminists’ interrogations could contribute to curriculum scholars’ negotiations of cultural, geographical, linguistic, and theoretical differences across a worldwide curriculum studies field. In particular, I autobiographically explore feminist examinations of transnational flows and mobilities as one possible means to hold varying perspectives on these phenomena in simultaneous yet often tension-filled relation to one another. Conceptions of transnational flows and mobilities become visceral through embodied autobiographical inquiries that take into account shifting and rapidly changing discursive and material effects of globalization. These effects include knowledges and identities produced at everyday educational sites as well as within the potentials of a worldwide curriculum studies field.