Curriculum as a political text

Abstract

William Pinar has recently moved to the University of British Columbia, where he directs the Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. Pinar has lectured widely and published extensively on gender and racial politics, religion, curriculum theory and discourses , sexuality and queer theory. The father of a son named Gabriel , Pinar lives with his partner Jeff Turner in Surrey. This interview will zoom in on the concept of curriculum as a political text. How would you define your political standpoint? I'm on the left, more Freudian than Marxian, very much influenced by the Greens, and by racial and gender theorists. The through-line among these influences is the centrality of subjectivity in political life. In the 2004 book, I called upon traditions of African American autobiography to teach this point; recently I completed a chapter on Fanon which underlines the same fact. Since 1968, I have dedicated myself to study and explicate subjectivity within the social through several traditions, including those listed in the first sentence above: my first book title included the terms "cultural revolution" and "heightened consciousness" (1974). For the next 20 years, I focused on autobiography, politics, and sexuality (Pinar 1994). In the second half of the 1990s I focused on the "crisis" of masculinity to extend our understanding of U.S. racial politics and violence (2001). During the first half of the present decade, I constructed a genealogy of "whiteness" in the West (2006a). In sustainability debates, I have long appreciated the eco-feminists who, by focusing on the gender of the assault on the earth, have directed our attention to that assault's subjective prerequisites and its subjective remedies (see Doerr 2004). Recalling the U.S. tradition in pragmatism, I argue there can be no social reconstruction without subjective reconstruction [Excerpt].