By employing the autobiographical method of currere and bifocalization, this book sheds light on the significance of love and the ethics of caregiving as means to transform curriculum studies into a post-reconceptualist and collective endeavor. Advancing an understanding of curriculum as a "collective public moral enterprise", it critically asks whether we can build a world where love is not negotiated, but only proliferated. Through the creation of short and interconnected autobiographical narratives about the meanings of love, the author provides pivotal insights for curricularists who labor in conflicting and paradoxical contexts. As such, the book seeks to demonstrate how the labor of "love fortification" may be accomplished in a world of agonistic, antagonistic, and competitive becoming(s). Highlighting the role of caregiving, this book questions the role of evaluations in post-reconceptualization and provides insights for educators and policymakers on how to promote "actualization" and reconciliation in schools in contexts across the global-north and -south. Engaging with a long scholarly tradition that ultimately seeks to understand the meanings of love in our lives and in our work, supporting the "historization" of the field of curriculum, and with an international focus, this book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

This book urgently confronts systems of privilege and oppression within education, and combines concepts including bifocality, currere, and conscientizacao to highlight the role of dialogical and autobiographical reflection in dismantling neoliberal and colonial logics at the level of theory, policy, and practice. The author purposefully connects methods and concepts from curriculum, social studies and the arts, and offers insights into identity formation, social position, and social transformation. As such, Jales Coutinho presents an opportunity for curricularists to evaluate the connections between their lives and their work within and across mutually-constitutive discursive and material contexts, and critically analyze their agency, their relational encounters, and their position as changemakers within unjust social realities. Focusing on the intersection of curriculum theory with educational policy and leadership, the text calls for a mutual "becoming conscious" to illustrate how this can affect a paradigmatic shift toward social justice education, lived curriculum, and emancipatory pedagogy. With the potential to expand and set the tone for a long-standing curriculum conversation for curriculum theorists, educational leaders and policymakers concerning the contours and dimensions of our work in schools, research institutions, and policy circles, it crucially asks: what does it mean to engage in the complicated conversation of curriculum work in a post-reconceptualist era?