ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we begin by conceptualizing sensational currere as a method to explore both our racialized and gendered autobiographies and our embodied encounters with a set of curricular materials created within an extracurricular program for working-class Black schoolgirls in the United States. We theorize sensational currere as a method of curriculum inquiry that attends to the curriculum workers’ 1) racialized and gendered autobiographies, and 2) body at the moment(s) and site(s) of the curriculum encounter. We then employ this method by interrogating the sensorial experience of thinking, writing about and reading about the aforementioned curriculum, and then mapping the intensities borne of this process onto aspects of our autobiographies. A sensational currere brings to the fore our feelings about the troubling (respectability) discourses circulating in the curriculum while allowing us to contextualize those affective, curricular charges vis-ā-vis our autobiographies. This approach foregrounds embodied ways of knowing and being in an exploration of how curriculum workers’ particular bodies position them—and are positioned—in the world. Additionally, this inquiry process allows us to imagine how curriculum work might account for the complex contours of curricularists’ racialized and gendered multiplicities—contours through which we make sense of ourselves within the world.
