Speculating on Speculative Fiction

FIELD OF EDUCATION attempts to create new spaces for thinking about imagining the endeavor of education otherwise.Its semantic register includes fantasy, science fiction, horror and derivatives like gothic dystopia, weird and post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, and superhero tales.Flourishes of each are found in this special collection.Within Western literary-critical discourse, this form arises from a convergence of oppositional stands that include feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial thought.This broad range of narrative forms subvert the post-Enlightenment androcentric and colonialist mindset with its correlates of 'truth,' 'facts,' and 'power' imposed by exploitative global capitalism.It is an attempt to upset the contemporary framework that structures the institution of education in relation to its digital technologization; its structuring of classroom spaces; its foregrounding knowledge at the expense of affective empathy; and its surveillance and categorizations of students who are denied on sex/gendered, racial, ablest grounds in the name of impartiality, objectivity, and fairness, to rhetorically uphold equal opportunity and an education for all.The strategies of speculative fiction require a kind of haptic non-mimetic description in which the educational researcher discovers her object of analysis by writing out its inhabited elements in space and time narratologically.It requires a speculative topological world of everyday sensibilities as lived through things; an attention to the complex emergence of worlds, the happenings of everyday life as to what matters.There is a reflexivity involved that might be described as the perception of perception, a doubled perception that could be given the grapheme self-refleXion (jagodzinski, 2008) where the capitalized 'X' targets what escapes consciousness.Here I am thinking of the pre-conscious world of sensibility, contingency, and indeterminant forces; rhythms of matter that allude us in their imperceptibility; rhythms of living that are both addictive, shifting, and repetitive that need to be arrested and examined, at least for the time of the unfolding of the story.This X is, therefore, an abstraction.It can only be gotten at through speculation, projection, and atmospheric attunements.The gap (or absolute) between the subject and object is widened as the writer-researcher attempts to construct a decorrelated world to make us think otherwise.The decorrelated narratives of speculative fiction play with spacetime in ways that subvert normative perception.These can be compossible worlds that coexist or be true together without contradiction.They are subject to abductive logic rather than the usual inductive or deductive reasoning, where an unexpected or surprising fact becomes the focus of the story as it is an outlier phenomenon.A speculative hypothesis is entertained that is inherently creative that often plays with the near to the A