What does curriculum do? Thinking with the rhizome, micropolitics, and cartography

This paper asks: what does curriculum do? Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988/2013) concept of the rhizome, curriculum is looked at as an immanent, affective, and political force that actualizes in the spacetime of the lesson. The inquiry draws on several weeks of visiting with a seventh-grade classroom. Through “curricular incisions”, classroom life is rendered perceptible in its embodied, relational, and uneven intensities. Across scenes of stillness, appetite, disbelief, and sonic excess, the paper shows how curriculum gathers, recalibrates, shelters, disciplines, and withholds. In doing so, the analysis traces curriculum’s micropolitics through the shifting relations between molarity and molecularity, potestas and potentia, and planned and lived experience. The paper argues that curriculum does not simply transmit knowledge or organize learning; it proposes that curriculum “juncts” bodies, affects, knowledges, directions, and conditions of inclusion, exposing the possibility and limit of what can be known, felt, and endured in classroom life. Rather than idealizing rhizomatic fluidity, the paper foregrounds tension, showing curriculum as both productive and perilous, inclusive and exclusionary at once.