In the middle of things: encountering questions about equality in social studies education

Abstract

This paper explores a teaching practice that considers equality in social studies in a Swedish upper secondary school. The questions explored were: What become produced within the teaching practice? and How to encounter these issues without reproducing them? To explore these questions I put to work a theoretical framework of feminist post-humanism and a participatory methodological approach. This meant that I collaborated with one teacher and participated in planning and teaching activities. The analysis of the teaching practice focuses on three events involving cries, lines and stairs; these events display the complex processes in which norms and categorizations are produced and revealed how both stabilizations and tensions became enacted within the teaching. In the concluding remarks, I further discuss these tensions in terms of troubles and hopes and elaborate on the encounter between social studies curriculum and a feminist post-humanist approach.