Education after waste: Transactional ecologies, dissensus, and the reconstruction of curriculum

Abstract

This article examines how neoliberal educational reforms generate a wasted curriculum—knowledges, histories, and human capacities rendered expendable by standardization, accountability, and efficiency-driven schooling. Grounded in Dewey and Bentley’s transactional ecology, the analysis challenges interactional models of education that privilege closure and control over emergence and relationality. The concept of haecceity is mobilized to foreground irreducible difference and resist the fetishization of sameness that underwrites curricular waste. Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical account of time and relational emergence, the article reconceptualizes waste as a site of unrealized democratic and ecological potential. Case studies from museum pedagogy, including Mining the Museum and Curating Discomfort, illustrate how dissensus and discomfort disrupt hegemonic narratives and reopen suppressed histories. The article concludes by advocating for curricular reconstruction through transactional, plural ecologies that reclaim waste as a pedagogical resource and sustain democratic possibility.

Keywords

References

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