Fractal Futures : Worlds to come in-the-making of educational theory

Abstract

This dissertation explores futurity as a philosophical, epistemic, and methodological problem. Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its destabilization of “commonsense futures,” the study explores some of the ways in which dominant linear-progressive models of time positions what has not happened,<i> the future</i>, as a calculable and manageable “object” upon scientific gazing. Such gazing institutes an ethics of separation, supporting modern views of the world that tend to divide time, space, and life into discrete and governable parts. Drawing from body of work in black feminist philosophy, the study highlights how separation is a key for the perpetuation of racial capitalism, colonial hierarchies, and epistemic violence. Particularly as Western scientific and philosophical traditions—rooted in Euclidean geometry, Cartesian logic, and derived rationalist philosophies—render the future an extended location into an abstract/ immaterial timeline. This project interrogates these frameworks and associates them with the erasure of alternative ontologies, epistemologies and engagements with what is yet to happen.

Central to the study is a critique of educational theory’s implicit developmental futurism, conceiving individual development and societal progress as integrating a same linear progression. Enlightenment-derived notions of interiority and causal linearity are identified as apt to delineate futures in educational and socio-material terms. By framing education as preparation for predefined futures, mainstream educational paradigms reify a sequential temporality that privileges perpetual self- development over sensibility to implication material and virtual contingencies in life- living. This perpetuates the epistemic and ethical underpinnings of racial capitalism, prioritizing individualization and pre-determined productivity over the incipiency of problems and more-than-human relationships.

The student plays a fundamental role in education theorization, set as the locus of educational concerns and intervention. However, the student figure is foreshadowed by the child—conceived as presently insufficient but naturally bound to growth (development) through an exceptional capacity to be shaped by knowledge and instruction. Educational sciences may affirm their mission to advance students’ moral and existential development, yet often neglect the effects of raciality, rendering invisible the scientific gaze upon itself.

As a conceptual response, the study proposes the notion of <i>fractal futures</i>, which is a practicetheoretical poethical composition offering points of reference rather than universalized coordinate locations of ‘where’ futures are. Fractal futures propose a conceptual image that privileges aesthetics and hapticality as sources to theorizing futurity. Spirals and other fractal patterns perform world-making powers by iterating its aesthetic, haptically modulating same shapes across the most diverse bodies. Fractal futures tell stories of feltness beyond the racial regime that imposes separability between kinds of lives. A fractal sense of future tells of iterative processes of memory working to improvise acts of communing, folding pasts and futures into differential presents.

As a methodological response, the project experimentally devises a practicetheoretical approach that re/de/composes education theorizing. The experiment consists of a collectivizing and performative approach to knowledge production that embraces the opacity of futures in-the-making. Collective biography and artistic practices are explored as circumstances to navigate into futurity, in both its lived and metaphysical dimensions. Through the fabulation of autobiographical memory stories, the study crafted the <i>Touching futures</i> deck of cards—a performative research tool that materializes the interplay between futures and pasts, anticipation and improvised futurities. The cards were created as experimental practices to put concepts in motion, bearing potential to activate yet other experiments that deal with the capabilities arising on incipient events.

An education theorized through fractal futures is analogous to the relations activated through the deck of cards. Education is thus dislocated from concerns over the interiority of subjects and wishes to develop, improve, emancipate students. Instead of premising the <i>being</i> of human subjects, a fractal sense of education is sustained through an ethics that seeks ways to perform the deep implication between all that ever lived and will live. Education is thence theorized as an indeterminate field of more-than-human relations, finding its own forms of valuation which cannot be determined a-priori.

By tracing the historical trajectories of racial capitalism and its entwinement with conceptions of <i>the child</i>, educational theorization and practices, the study highlights the ethical and political stakes of reimagining futurity. Futures are thence conceived as gestational, contingent, and intertwined with collective ethical practices. By refusing the linear, hierarchical temporality of "the World as we know it," the dissertation opens space for decolonial engagements with futures, encouraging performative enactments of worlds yet to come. This work contributes to critical educational and childhood studies’ theorizing, and it calls for an epistemological shift toward relational, haptic, and improvisational modes of inquiry that honour the multiplicity and indeterminacy of futurity. Through its interdisciplinary and experimental approach, the dissertation offers new tools and conceptual frameworks for understanding and engaging with the complexities of time, space, and becoming in a world marked by deep-seated inequalities and ecological crises.