Theoretical analysis uncovers pedagogical responses to ecological collapse, indicating that embracing ontological ruin challenges traditional educational paradigms.
Ecological collapse, political fragmentation, and existential crisis define our present. This paper theorizes “a curriculum at the end of time” that emerges from abjection and pointing towards the becoming apocalyptic body. I explore how curriculum and educational spaces replicate collapse through systemic realities, corporeal experiences, and ontological ruin. The apocalyptic body, excluded from traditional educational experiences, becomes a site of profound curricular significance where the failed promises of futurity are revealed. Engaging with a variety of critical theories, such as abjection, ruin epistemologies, and apocalyptic imagery, this paper proposes a curriculum that rejects salvation and reconstruction, embracing collapse, and learning through decay, mourning, and radical unmaking. I argue for a curriculum theory that embraces ruin and collapse to live and create amongst the unknowability of social life, allowing being and unbeing to coexist in the curricular spaces of the abject and its potential apocalyptic moments.
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Abraham P. DeLeon (2026) studied this question.
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