Into the void of discourse

In this conceptual essay, I propose a way of viewing silence or silent texts in discourse for educators and educational researchers who are facing the growing call to bring to light hidden biases, histories and other sociocultural phenomena largely hidden from public audiences. Specifically, I explore the potential affordances from going against the grain of the long and widely established view of silence as anything but void. Taking up the scientific notion of void as the known unknown, I examine what we can gain as educators and researchers when viewing silence as unexplored time-space of social matter, a view acknowledged long ago by literary giant James Baldwin. Using media about recent sociopolitical movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, I explore the void of discourse–the unpublished works, hidden exchanges, and forgotten or misrepresented experiences that are brought forth through the guidance of those with respective cultural knowledge and expertise, once given the space to do so. Viewing silence as a discursive void positions the educational researcher as a co-learner who attends to the contextual aspects of social interactions with open acknowledgement of the racialized and gendered systems that bind our social spaces. Implications for epistemological approaches are discussed.