Abstract
Inheriting Possibility is concerned with the ways we have come to understand and produce knowledge about the reproduction of power relations and how those understandings have rested on a premise that nature is made of fixed universals that create the stage for the play of culture. It is said that “truth” exists in nature and that culture contaminates our access to these “truths.” It is argued that this same dualism underpins theories and research on inheritance, social reproduction, and human learning and development.
Given work in the physical and biological sciences and new materialist philosophy, it is not only argued that nature is culture but also that the assumed nature/culture binary has ultimately limited our understanding of how power relations are reproduced. Thus, Inheriting Possibility develops new arguments about the forces of inheritance (i.e., the double injunction and intra-action of material-discursive forces, timespace, and assemblages) and rethinks approaches to quantitative inquiry on social reproduction in education. Inheriting Possibility delineates how the limitations of knowledge production have been due to the false assumptions about the possibilities of unlocking nature’s “truths” with quantification. It puts forward an alternative ontology, epistemology, and methodology that attempt to carve out a space within critical inquiry for quantitative methods. Inheriting Possibility empirically demonstrates how parenting practices and grandchild SAT performance are both results of myriad forces that are multigenerational, events, and material phenomena that cannot be reduced to pathology or deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of reconfiguring and enfolding historialities of differential patterns of possibility.
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