Friendship and Liking as a Way Beyond Love and Hate in Education

• In Event: Queer Relationalities: Love, Friendship, and Other Conundrums of Educational Life

Abstract

The proposed paper develops an affect that moves away from the emotional ligatures of love and hate and toward the relationality of liking. We begin with Alison’s On Being Liked (2003) proposing that in relationships of unequal power love is inherently about changing the object toward which love is directed. Liking, rather, asks for different things. In order to explore an alternative affect, we take John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) as an object lesson in how a reparative reading of friendship might helpfully devalue love and hate in a well known pedagogical relationship. We offer this reading of Peace because of its ubiquity in school curricula and to provide different frames through which to view the possible in education.

Authors

• Kevin Burke, University of Notre Dame

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago