Reconceptualizing Emancipatory Education as Affective and Ontological Praxis

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Pedagogy and the Challenges of Contemporaneity (Table 27)

Abstract

The tradition of emancipatory education that builds from Freire’s work seeks liberation from the logics of power that organize diverse aspects of the self and social life. Its philosophical orientations and commitments crucially differentiate it from mainstream forms of education. However, while emancipatory education has been extensively theorized with regard to its ideological and epistemological dimensions, there has been less work considering how this tradition should be elaborated at the levels of affect and ontology. This paper explores these domains, and argues that in order to respond to this challenge, emancipatory teaching should foreground affective attunement, attention to the terrain of subjectivization, and interrogation of rituals of domination, in addition to its familiar concern with cultivating critical consciousness.

Authors

• Noah De Lissovoy, University of Texas at Austin

• Adam Martinez, University of Texas at Austin

• Celine Norman, University of Texas at Austin