Horrors of the Great Banal

Abstract

The iPhone 62 has just been released. Political gridlock and the governmentally approved process of locking immigrant children in cages continue ad infinitum. Public schools resort to primarily remote learning as pandemic viruses ebb and flow. University students study post-postmodernism on campuses that remain on stolen Indigenous land. In this year of 2071, where humans remain desperately attached to “normalcy,” suffering continues beneath the fear that transformation would surely be devastating. Unknowns horrify privileged communities, eased only by the comfortability of a level of “bad” with which they are at least familiar. The world has settled into the Great Banal, an age of blind faith that tomorrow’s problems can be answered with solutions of yester-today. Written as an “e-seance” Zoom conversation among “ghost-scholars of the future,” we explore the horrors of a future in which the “normalities” of 2021 all persist. This is not a dystopian nightmare in which climate disasters wreak unparalleled havoc on vulnerable communities and new fascist regimes sink their claws into education, nor is it a utopic imagining of a society that has made great bounds toward social-ecological justice. In this seemingly absurd imaginary of no substantial change at all, we draw from (eco)critical, Indigenous, and feminist frameworks to ask: What might education look like in a world that has adamantly resisted radical transformation for fear of the worst, in exchange for all hopes of the best?