"We Are Your Guilty Conscience": Reading the White Rose Leaflets Pedagogically

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum and Pedagogy in Popular Spaces

Abstract

As a response to the contemporary post-truth era and its attendant attacks on knowledge, difference, and reason, we engage in an “antimethodological” reading of the leaflets of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi collective comprised mainly of students from the University of Munich in 1942-43, as well as contemporary forms of activist engagement. From these readings and an interpretive framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Novalis, we argue for a reconceptualization of pedagogy that resists problematic and likely futile appeals to rationality and instead mobilizes registers of affect, identity, and haunting toward an ontologically grounded ethics.

Authors

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University

• Shalin Lena Raye, Purdue University