Moving on (part 2): Power and the child in curriculum history

This paper is the second in a two-part series that maps continuities and ru ptures in conceptions of power and traces their effects in educational disc ourse on 'the child'. It delineates two post-Newtonian intellectual traject ories through which concepts of 'power' arrived at the theorization of 'the child': the paradoxical bio-physical inscriptions of human-ness that accom panied mechanistic worldviews and the explanations for social motion in pol itical philosophy. The intersection of pedagogical theories with 'the child ' and 'power' is further traced from the latter 1800s to the present, where a Foucaultian analytics of power-as-effects is reconsidered in regard to h istories of motion. The analysis culminates in an examination of post-Newto nian (dis)continuities in the theorization of power, suggesting some produc tive paradoxes that inhabit turn of the 21st-century conceptualizations of the social.