Solastalgia and the Curriculum of Place

The purpose of this presentation is to explore the curricular landscape of the recent pandemic characterized by, among other aspects, displacement and solastalgia--a term used to describe a form of psychic or existential distress caused by ongoing or episodic environmental change (Smith, 2010; MacSuibhne, 2009; Albrecht(2007, et al., 2007: Albrecht, 2005). In this paper, we use a curricular lens to examine the “course of life” jointly embodied by the displaced students, teachers and researchers and their deep desire for educational places rendered dangerous in new ways events . Curricular discussions of the significance of place in the south often make use of the notion of nostalgia (Casemore (2008), Kincheloe & Pinar (1991); Manathunga (2018) ;Slattery & Daigle (1994); Pinar (2019); Whitlock (2007). In contrast, this paper uses the notion solastalgia, as an interpretive place of dislocation from which subjective and “socially legible meanings can be and are forged”(Bauman, 2007, p. 42). Solastalgia, writes, Albrecht (2007), “is not about looking back at some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home’ (p, 96). Rather, solastalgia is the‘lived experience of the breakdown of the normal relationship between psychic identity and home (Albrecht, 2011.p. 225) or “the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived in the present”(Albrecht et all, 2007, p.96). Displacement becomes for this paper an epistemological landscape of sorts from which to re-build our understandings- of or at least (re) place a pandemic curriculum of place in relation larger structures that shape the way we find our place in it