Remembrance, Emancipatory Pedagogies, and the Affective Dynamics of Education

• In Event: World Education Research Association–International Research Network Global Ethics in Higher Education

Abstract

Commenting on the January 7, 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting, Zizek (2015) asks if we have arrived at the time of Nietzsche’s Last Men—if indeed, the antagonism of on the one hand, what can be read as Western apathy and vacuous consumerism and, on the other, suicidal dedication to a transcendent cause might fruitfully be read as twin nihilisms. While nihilism in contemporary transnational youth cultures has been the subject of considerable discussion (beyond moral panics reacting to punk and other youth subcultures, see also Malik, 2015; West, 2004), it is the crisis in imagination that concerns social justice educator, Max Haiven (2014). Observing the financialization of public imaginaries, Haiven asks how global capitalist consumer culture encloses creativity as an individualist, competitive skill in entrepreneurial processes of accumulation. He contends that creativity as a fecundity of imagination arises through the biodiversity of the social commons, as it has from the physical commons: “While the commons have often been imagined as simply fallow, untended lands or resources that people take from at their leisure, they are … important sites of innovation and experimentation, in terms of both human stewardship … and new ways of cooperating” (2014, 194-5).
This discussion points to my interest in the ways Global Justice Education (GJE) aims to pedagogically effect a commoning of memory (Haiven, 2014), imagination, and epistemic diversality (Mignolo, 2000; Andreotti, 2011) across relations of difference—geopolitical, cultural, epistemological, spiritual—that generate fecundity and growth. The latter are key dynamics of learning to which much education as a social praxis aspires. The notion of commoning extends beyond central GJE concepts of interdependence as it is emergent from particular knowledge traditions. For example, in arguing that reversing climate change is an issue not of Northern benevolence and aid but rather of climate debt and climate justice, Bolivian indigenous political figures and social movements have recast the atmosphere (as well as Mother Earth) as a global commons (Redman, 2009).
In this paper, I examine what I identify as four vectors of growth that underpin corresponding aesthetic qualities and actives states of learning. While I consider these vectors inherent to all learning, I’m specifically interested in their relevance for social and global justice learning. These vectors trace movements of growth defined by the dynamics of alterity germane to living in the world: seeking perspective beyond oneself and one’s immediate experience, integrating and embodying this perspective, generating new forms of meaning, and communicating and sharing these dialogically with others and the world around one.
I ground my discussion in my own qualitative inquiry into GJE. My discussion examines the ways such vectors of growth and learning are always vulnerable to instrumentalization within circuits of neoliberal social affect that capture and enclose their radical ethical, social, and epistemic potential.

Author

• Lisa K. Taylor, Bishop's University