Based on the ethnographic research, this paper provides insights in how the future of the past is negotiated for a History high school curriculum in Berlin. It reveals how future histories are currently negotiated.
Paper long abstract:
Based on the ethnographic research, this paper will argue that considering both ontological politics (Mol1999) of our research practice and our epistemic practices (Hacking 1983, Law & Lien 2012, Verran 2010) are crucial practices when thinking about how to think of the past in the future.
In order to show how different ideas of future concepts of the past were put in practice and contested, the paper will start by presenting research results, arguing that the design of a History curriculum in Germany and their implementation of ideas of how to make use of historical knowledge were directed to an unspecified future knower of History. By applying the concepts of the ontic/epistemic imaginary (Verran 2001), the paper will argue that the students in a classroom contested this specific historical knowledge and the emerging history. Instead of re-ordering the previously ordered microworld according to the requirements of the curriculum, they re-negotiated how to think about the past in the future and re-made a future that was different from the past (Verran 2001).