Democratic Education in an Armed Society Learning to Live with Guns

Democratic Education in an Armed Society examines the points of intersection between school gun violence and democratic education. Tracing conversations about agency and mastery in the archives of liberalism, pragmatism and new materialism, Samantha Deane explores the connection between how we teach children to think of themselves as democratic actors and the unceasing plague of gun violence. Juxtaposing two images of political agency, Deane connects an essentialized view of humans as masters of themselves, objects, and history with discourses that aims to train individuals to be autonomous and rational users of objects like guns. This liberal view, she contends, gives us no way to think about how objects, narratives, and norms contour the selves we claim to be. Deane posits another way. She suggests that we learn to attend to the ways in which our ability to act in the world is shared and distributed. In a society shot through with guns an enamored with individualism, the future of associational life depends on whether we learn to do democracy with the objects we hold dear.It requires a reckoning with our constitutive betweenness and efforts to educate children to think while enmeshed within the complex association of human + gun.