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Abstract
In this study, I use theories of poststructuralism, feminist new materialism, posthumanism, and affect to investigate and theorize my experiences as a classroom teacher entangled with dominant discourses related to gender, social class, neoliberalism, and postfeminism. This dissertation is non-traditional in structure, as it addresses teacher educators, educational researchers, and teacher practitioners in three manuscript-length chapters for publication in scholarly journals. In the first manuscript, I draw on my experience as an elementary school teacher who attempted to create a “Pinterest-perfect” classroom. Using vignettes, images, and poststructural conceptualizations of subjectivity and discourse, I demonstrate that despite dominant notions of individual choice, the Pinterest-perfect classroom can be understood as an object of discourse that both produces and is produced by discursive power (Foucault, 1972). In the second manuscript, I theorize my engagement with classroom transformations as a cruelly optimistic attachment (Berlant, 2011) tied to my demoralization (Santoro, 2018) as a teacher working in a destructive educational environment dominated by policies and practices designed to uphold neoliberal capitalism. I demonstrate that my attachment to classroom transformations and my vision of good work (Gardner et al., 2001) as a teacher were ultimately connected to fantasies of the good life (Berlant, 2011). Finally, in the third manuscript, I turn to ontology and make an argument for integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence in teacher education courses. I argue that integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence can radically reorient students’ thinking, being, and doing, which can fundamentally change how they approach teaching.