Back up Group: Here Comes the (Post) Reconceptualization‪.‬

There's an awful lot of talk about the Post-Reconceptualization lately. The question is, is it Post or (Post)? And what does ( ) signify? Are movements ever really (Post) after all? Perhaps they are merely (Post)? That is, this generation and the last generation overlap; our teachers are part of us as we are part of them. Let's face it, Post-Structuralism is a direct reaction to Structuralism. After-structures are in direct relation to overturning structures. And besides we are still children of the Enlightenment. Further, we are still children of the Reconceptualization, even if we come (Postly) to the movement-at-hand. To be (Post) suggests that the movement has connection with what has come before and is not chopped off from it entirely or divided by a deep chasm. We are intertwined with our intellectual ancestors no matter how much we think we are different from them. And yet.... My generation is different from, say, the last generation. More specifically, the curriculum scholars of my generation draw from and get sustenance from our teachers, but I would say that there is something going on that is new. And so the aporia of the (Post) Reconceptualization. It is not Post, but (Post). Bill Pinar addressed many of the major categories that are-to-come in the (Post) Reconceptualization at the 2005 Bergamo Conference. I will not reiterate what Bill said in his talk but rather I shall try here to discuss, generally speaking, what I see going on in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing as a clue to what it is that my generation is interested in exploring. In the Winter Issue 2005, for example, one may see a broad range of topics explored. From Beowulf to Walt Whitman, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to masculinity studies, from mother-son plots to disavowal and arrival, from fear and fighting to class struggles. The Fall issue of 2005 dealt with issues of Broadway, eating, currere, Sci Fi, mediocrity and domestication, slavery, melancholia, freedom and Spinoza, aggression and psychoanalysis, abstract expressionism. The Spring issue of 2005 dealt with issues around witnessing, corporate culture and feminism, Deleuze, identity and liminality, post-colonialism and Korea, Julian of Norwich, Dada, democracy, imagination, aesthetics and Reggae. JCT/Fall 2004. Here we find interest in these subjects: myth and prose poems, architecture and poetics, transformative archetypes, radical geography, desire, complexity, gender, autobiography, history and Romania, unremembered states, magic and chocolate. These JCT issues signify a wide range of topics of interest. The next generation of curricularists are not afraid to write about on-the-edge subjects.