Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial 'crashing' captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading (...) representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred. (shrink)

This paper compares aspects of the thinking of Walter Benjamin and John Dewey. Both attempted to address the problem of ‘poverty of experience’ in modern society by means of an anti-dualistic concept of experience and the concept of media. These concepts can be observed optimally in their work on aesthetics. Such concepts of experience and media were the keys to the development of new conceptions of education. Differences in their understanding of media, however, led them to different strategies in the (...) development of their educational thought. The present paper will show that Benjamin's strategy offers a promising alternative to that of Dewey. (shrink)

This paper asks and examines the question “who are you?” In doing so it embarks across the conceptual terrain of subjectivity, passing through five different regions. First is the subject and otherness, in which are considered Arendtian notions of the “who” of the individual in the appearing world. Next is the relation between the “I” and the “you” in systems of recognition, and how those systems are creations and expressions of social normativity. This is followed by the idea of the (...) sovereignty of the self as a reaction to its dislocation within systems of recognition. Sovereignty as such is viewed through the thought of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. With Foucault, the authors approach the question of social normativity as a frame rather than a constraint by which the self is stylized. The fourth section of the paper then explores self-questioning as a means of explicit or intentional self-stylization. Contrasting the “mere liberation” of thinking in Arendt’s thought with broader understandings of freedom, the fifth section relates Arendt’s conception of the miraculous with Derrida’s of the event. The paper’s trajectory returns in conclusion to the implications of its course for the initial question of who one is, particularly with respect to the teaching subject. (shrink)

“Can you feel the warmth of the Hive?”Tom in Leave No Trace (2018).In a haunting scene in the motion picture Leave No Trace1 (Granik 2018), Tom, an adolescent girl living on the edges of normality,...

This paper employs aspects of Hannah Arendt’s thought to explore different but interrelated questions that haunt contemporary music education. We see the importance of a return to Arendt now more than ever as we find ourselves, three authors in three different countries, trying to contribute to democratic music education practices and to researching the conceptual base of such practices, in countries where technocratic approaches to policy development prevail. More specifically in this article we address the following questions: how can we (...) re-think the political and creative dimensions of music education pedagogies in the face of recent educational policy trends? How can we go beyond linearity in our everyday educational encounters? How can we create forms of music education practice and research that induce a continuous interplay between acting and thinking? We pursue these questions through reference to three specific forms of music education practice: research seminars for PhD-students and senior researchers, pre-service music teacher education, and teaching music improvisation. In the first part of the paper, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist elaborates upon how Hannah Arendt’s thinking influences our teaching, taking an on-going research seminar in music education as an example of a common place. In the second part, Cathy Benedict writes of ‘meeting’ Arendt and coming to an awareness of how Arendt can help us interrogate practices we have come to assume as ‘the right ones’. Seeking to create together with her students an epistemological space of appearance she challenges common teaching strategies that seem to ‘work’. Working within a teacher preparation program she comes to realize that students must also reflect on these moments so as to name what has occurred; thus they need to engage in acts of performative listening, setting aside their own desire and need to speak and be heard first. Finally, in the third part, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos raises the complex issue of how we should respond to the current deluge of entrepreneurial approaches to creativity, its use value, and its role in education. Based on the proposition that acts of musical improvisation belong to the realm of action, Kanellopoulos revisits Arendt’s notion of conservatism with the aim of outlining a possible way through which contemporary improvisation pedagogy might be re-thought. Taken together these three sets of reflections serve to offer a framing of Arendt’s thinking for music educators in different contexts, showing how Arendt's ideas might serve as a fertile ground for thinking over our own teaching, our curricular decisions, and the choices we daily make over space and time that connect us through our distinctness. (shrink)

Arendt claims that our natality (i.e., our condition of being born) is the “source” or “root” of our capacity to begin (i.e., of our capacity to initiate something new). But she does not fully explain this claim. How does the capacity to begin derive from the condition of birth? That Arendt does not immediately and unambiguously provide an answer to this question can be seen in the fact that her notion of natality has received very different interpretations. In the present (...) paper, I seek to clarify the notion. I bring together and examine Arendt’s scattered remarks about natality and propose a new interpretation that responds to the stated question. Along the way, I show how the various existing interpretations have arisen and argue that, in view of that question, they are inadequate. (shrink)