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This article engages with three commonly traversed social studies topics--depictions of violence and death from the French Revolution, during the Vietnam War, and regarding U.S. histories of racial segregation--through the lens of Achille Mbembe's "necropolitics" (i.e., political and social machinations of power that determine who lives and who dies). In particular, this article theorizes how specific necropolitical concepts (e.g., "necropower," "the living dead," and "slow death") can be a generative and powerful form of analysis for social studies educators and their students that exposes intersecting complexities between life, death, political alliance, and power. While this article argues that social studies curriculum is replete with undertheorized moments of death and underutilized opportunities to engage with death, this scholarship is guided by the questions: "What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?" The overall aim of a necropolitical engagement is to foster a deeper understanding of why/how death continues to disproportionately come into being again and again for specific, targeted peoples.

We, now colleagues, look to our "first" collective encounter with Deleuze and Guattari that took place in a university course on poststructuralism, where one of us was the teacher and three were students. This encounter still disturbs us. And new and different encounters happen each time we reread "A Thousand Plateaus," revisit our previous conversations, and/or rewrite this manuscript. Each encounter produces a new trail(ing). We follow some of these trail(ing)s and write this manuscript as an invitation for other students and teachers not to rush to understanding. We find great possibility comes from (re)encountering these readings that leave us confused, distressed, and/or scared, because these readings and the (re)encounters that follow also leave us open to new possible intra-actions and be(com)ings with/in the world.

This article engages in curriculum work regarding the theft of Black bodies and history/ies, the plundering of Black cemeteries, and sustained hegemonic efforts to use and reuse Black bodies for white/settler onto-epistemological advancements. In particular, this article draws from assemblages of violence and necropolitics to explore implications of postmortem racism on curriculum studies. By tracing the history of body snatching, we identify and discuss the problematic of snatching as a practice and connect it to the problematic of white/settler onto-epistemologies that remain (violently) connected to educational research. The implications of these problematics lead us to call for more "wake work" in embodying, decolonizing, and unsettling curriculum.

This article engages Gloria Anzaldúa's concepts of "nepantla" and "nepantleras" as a conceptual framework for social studies classrooms that is attuned to the lived experiences of border-crossing--living in-between national, ethnic, racial, and gender worlds--and the "grietas y rajaduras" (cracks and ruptures) of dominant narratives of colonialism, whiteness, and heteropatriarchy. Nepantleras, those who live, breathe, and challenge the antagonization of people through imposed borders, drive such cracks and ruptures by resisting assimilation and by centering already existing possible worlds. In critically examining social studies education--classroom, field, and educator--through a lens of nepantla, we conceptualize "aspiring nepantleras" as our scholarship horizon--the place we navigate toward where we center the undeniable grietas in dominant narratives made visible by the presence of nepantleras in the social studies classroom, as well as the scholarly field. Such work is essential to healing and to the formation of healthy communities that care for and embrace all students.

As two researchers interested in Holocaust and genocide education - yet coming from different research backgrounds and philosophical orienta-tions - we approached our scholarship with intention and a lot of tension about how to move forward productively. We were interested in investigating state legislation, particularly the flurry of it arriving since 2016, about teaching Holocaust and genocide education (and we both worked in states that were discussing or revising legislation). [Extracted from the article]

In this manuscript, we take up the invitation by the editors of this special issue and Deleuze to expose, explore, and expand Deleuze's triple definition of writing. We will chaos into three(lines). We become writers of three. We ask questions without definite answers: How do we write a piece that is never finished? Is writing supposed to be clear? What if writing is supposed to be listened to? Experienced? What does it provoke? And in an attempt to write that which is not supposed to be on paper, we write. Sketch. Drag. Produce a mess. Struggle. Resist. Create. Map. Sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to illustrate the inten(t/s)ional ways we tried to create spaces for thinking about paradigms as polyphonic and proliferating. We also share the joyful tensions of this work (hence, inten(t/s)ionalities) and specific pedagogical practices that we believe created a space for students to lean into and explore paradigms not only as a thing but also as a doing—paradigming. Our focus is to discuss (a) how some of Barad’s posthumanist theoretical concepts (e.g., ethico-onto-epistemology and intra-action) became pedagogical inspiration, and (b) through a diffractive reading of data with Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering, we were able to explore what was produced in the course. As we read posthumanist theory, the concepts not only shaped our methodology (i.e., diffractive analysis) but also became pedagogy. A posthumanist paradigm shaped our pedagogical practices as we believe that students are (becoming) qualitative inquirers through a knowing/being/doing in a material world of humans and nonhumans intra-acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four authors from art education, early childhood literacy education, and social studies education explore what counts as social science research with help from the blinded peer review process. The authors invite readers to think with wrongness when vetting data from a composite character named Reviewer 2, using artful methods of expression. The purpose of this article is not to complain about the experiences with Reviewer 2, but rather to explore the interface between academic publishing and knowledge production, specifically how our knowing and being as scholars is intimately entangled with academic publishing. We interact with author and essayist Chuck Klosterman's question "But What If We're Wrong?" in relation to dominant research assumptions and practices. Klosterman's book calls readers to ponder issues of ontology and epistemology not only in the present time, but also in an unknown future. Each author will share data from personal Reviewer 2 experiences and then diffract that data with/in Klosterman's Razor, or the idea that the most convincing assumptions also have the potential for wrongness. Data include paraphrased excerpts from qualitative inquiry studies published as a book, manuscript, and conference proposal reviews. The article "closes" by addressing the new and unexpected "openings" resulting from the entanglement of collaboration and with Klosterman's book and Reviewer 2's reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]