Teaching as Immortality Project: Positing Weakness in Response to Terror

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-5 - Constructing Knowledge in an Infinite Future: Terror, Trauma, Mental Illness, and Immortality

Abstract

Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help resolve existential terror. We suggest a new orientation, namely that we embrace the terror of the future that we cannot know. Through a theoretical engagement with Terror Management Theory and Weak Theology we identify some of the driving forces behind our motivations to teach, and then pair those insights with Thacker’s philosophical doomcore. The desired result is to reduce the cosmic stakes of teaching and refocus on the relationships we develop with other humans as well as with the unhuman planet.

Authors

• Cathryn van Kessel, University of Alberta

• Kevin Burke, University of Georgia - Athens