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Curiosity: An Affect of Resistance
- Theory & Event
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 24, Number 2, April 2021
- pp. 611-617
- 10.1353/tae.2021.0031
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Social justice movements are propelled by curiosity. Rejecting injustices of the status quo, these movements unite people in a collective reimagination of political futures. This work of political reimagination, moreover, involves persuading the public to question social institutions that have gone unquestioned, to acknowledge, for example, gender, race, education, or prisons as a conundrum, an unsolved and yet urgent problem. It is on this grand scale that such movements engage curiosity. But social justice movements also engage curiosity in a seemingly more banal way. Recognizing that people suffer, that a specific group of people suffers in a specific way, these movements exercise a desire to know and to record the extent of that community’s pain and suffering, the effects of hatred and systemic injustice, the devil in the details. In this essay, I focus on that gray, meticulous hunt, drawing out the necessary and sufficient conditions of a political curiosity trained on collective pain.