Complacency Unsettled: Sebaldian Approaches to Injustice

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

What do we know of ourselves, how do we remember and what is it we find in the end? This session is motivated by timely questions sparked in reading, interpreting, and teaching through the writings of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). The four presenters on this panel, coming from different vantage points in curriculum theory/inquiry (autobiography, critical race education, Indigenous education, ethics), share the experience of being marked, even permanently changed, through encounters with Sebald. Sebald’s writing unsettles complacency. His prose proposes new ways to probe troubling questions, engaging the difficult knowledge of ongoing legacies of war, colonization, and displacement, confronting implication and moral responsibility and galvanizing the energy needed to bring into being a more just public world

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies

Chair

• Teresa Jean Strong-Wilson, McGill University

Papers

• Implication by Indirection - Teresa Jean Strong-Wilson, McGill University

• Reading W. G. Sebald's "Paul Bereyter" in a Teacher Education Classroom - Warren E. Crichlow, York University

• Truth and Reconciliation in Canada: Indigenous Peoples as Modern Subjects - Denise Lyn Daniels, University of Calgary

• W. G. Sebald and the Call to Bear Witness - David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University

Discussant

• Hannah Spector, Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg