Countering asocial justice: Consumer culture, stance and a cartography of encounter

In Social Foundations classrooms, social justice approaches to questions of difference are certainly part of the curriculum. After teaching numerous Social Foundations courses, I encountered several issues related to the way rigid identity categories were complemented by neoliberal narratives that seemed to limit class conversation in troubling ways---particularly in that students had a difficult time articulating a sense of connection with others beyond their circles of acquaintances. This dissertation is an exploration of how I might resolve some of those dilemmas.;I problematize the neoliberal subject position as it relates to questions of social justice, and offer that a relational approach to others may be a useful counter. Inspired by several scholars who address theoretical relational curricular possibilities, I designed a course using a consumer culture approach to constructing Other as a conceptual lens through which to begin talking about difference.;Using student data from that class, I introduce stance analysis as a way to interpret the data in terms of the ways students either reinscribed or interrupted a sense of neoliberal relationality. Finally, using the methodological approach of social cartography, I created a map wherein students could plot their encounters across difference.;This map is intended as a pedagogical heuristic that could be used to destabilize a self-possessed and individualistic neoliberal sense of self. To this end, the map is oriented toward an approach to self and Other that is contingent, ongoing and contextually mediated. I explore the pedagogical implications of the map and suggest that such approaches may be useful for better understanding how we are relationally constituted. I argue that entering social justice conversations from this vantage point may avoid some of the trappings of rigid identity categories without resorting to commonsense neoliberal narratives.