Itinerant curriculum theory: the "Heterotopian" logic. Challenging curriculum involution and occidentosis

Why has it been so difficult for critical theories and pedagogies to become hegemonic? Why has it become so oddly tough for critical theories and pedagogies to become dominant within counter-hegemonic platforms? In a world where there is so much to criticize, “why has it become so difficult to produce a critical curriculum theory?” (Santos, 1999, p. 197). What happened to critical curriculum theory! Whose critical curriculum theory! Who benefits! This chapter examines some of the challenges and theoretical impasses facing critical curriculum theory. The chapter situates such challenges within the current social global context framed by the resurgence of al-right impulses and the cruelty of the identical. The chapter also situates modernity and its western Eurocentric matrix as the riverbed of the current global social havoc, and it problematizes and explores the insufficiencies at the core of the critical path. In doing so, the chapter dissects some of the consequences of such insufficiencies, which triggered a curriculum involution, a state of regression within the curriculum field, and consequently the perpetuation of a “curriculum occidentosis”. The piece ends by advocating for an itinerant curriculum theory, as the future path for the field, an alternative utopian logic, a just theoretical metamorphosis, and an onto-epistemological declaration of independence.