Democracy, Education, and a Politics of Indignation

Abstract

First paragraph: We live in dangerous times. This statement is not intended to be trite or to rehearse fatalism and evoke dystopic discourses. Instead, it acts in this instance as a starting point for intention. The intention is to grapple with the various relationships, tensions, and discordances between democracy and decency while unpacking the various interpretations of both democracy and decency that such a grappling may reveal. To "grapple" will necessarily imply a nonlinear, nonpositivist narrative engagement with the ideas around these two multiconnotative terms in ways that invoke the metaphor of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005). Such nomadism inherent in rhizomatic narrative renderings, "brings into play very different regimes of signs," (Deleuze & Guatari, 2005, p. 21) as such explorations seek to unravel the many registers of experience, assemblages of thought, bundles of practice, and social and embodied materialities (Schatzki, 2002, 2003, 2010) that cohere around lived experiences and their conceptual resonances with democracy and decency. These are resonances that point to the unfolding temporal landscape of dangerousness in our times.