How does a world of rival victimhoods disrupt our understandings of the educational subject? In which ways do competing claims of victimhood and their connections with justice have an impact on everyday educational practices? These questions are at the heart of this essay. The analysis conceptualizes the affective logic of victimhood as a terrain…

This article aims to contribute to recent discussions on pedagogy of pain in world language education. Drawing on the limitations of language to represent and express trauma and pain, we foreground the value of pedagogies at the intersection of language, art, and trauma. It is our contention that a linguistic perspective in and of itself is…

The purpose of this paper is to draw together and engage some of the most prominent themes throughout the literature on emotions, affects, and trauma in classrooms: the representation of trauma in classrooms and its risks; the body as a part of traumatic experience and how it may be engaged pedagogically; and the un/making of affective communities…

The aim of this article is to use necropolitics and sentimentality as theoretical entry points to broaden understandings of death as a form of power against subjugated (e.g. Black, migrant, refugee) lives. This theorising is approached through the dilemma of showing or not showing dead-body images in the classroom as an ethical, political and…

This article explores how ignorance of vulnerability--particularly of others' vulnerability--may be produced and maintained in schools, especially in the context of pedagogical engagement with difficult histories. A focus on ignorance forces educators to ask not only about the epistemological presence of "difficult knowledge" in schools,…

This article argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of "political depression" and its affective implications in human rights education (HRE). In particular, the article focuses on the following questions: How might a theorization of political depression be relevant to efforts that…

The aim of this paper is to place Derrida's and Foucault's ideas on friendship in conversation and then discuss how those ideas provide a pedagogical space in which critical educators in conflict-troubled societies can promote new modes of being and living with others. In particular, the notion of critical pedagogies of friendship is…

In this article we discuss how the design of a higher education language course can challenge the power of sentimentality in the classroom. In particular, the paper analyses the role of literature in intercultural language education through the lens of affect theory, while focusing on minimizing sentimentality in the classroom, especially when the…

This essay draws on the concept of "difficult knowledge" to think with some of the interventions and arguments of affect theory and discusses the implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. The author makes an argument that affect theory enables the theorization of difficult knowledge as an…

This paper discusses teacher resistance to recognizing some perspectives of difficult histories. The paper focuses on the following question: How does affect contribute not only to the formation of teacher resistance, but also to its disruption in ways that enable the productive reclaiming of teachers' engagement with traumatic histories? To…

In recent years, author Michalinos Zembylas has been involved in the facilitation of peace education workshops for Greek-Cypriot teachers in his home country, Cyprus. Cyprus has been divided since the Turkish invasion in 1974, following a Greek-Cypriot "coup d' etat" that was orchestrated by the then Greek military junta. Thousands of…

This article critiques some of the existing literature in critical pedagogy and the way it tends to overlook or downplay the strong emotional investments of troubled knowledge in posttraumatic situations. Examining existing literature in critical pedagogy reiterates the argument that the discourse of critical pedagogy constructs and sustains its…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of a study on the way that two sample group of teachers, one in Israel and one in Cyprus, perceive forgiveness. The study is grounded in moral-philosophical ideas about forgiveness and the data is collected via interviews and focus groups. The findings show that participants in both samples…

This paper draws on psychoanalytic and socio-political perspectives of trauma and emotion to examine how "critical emotional praxis" may serve as a pedagogical tool for reconciliation education. A major challenge for teachers in traumatized societies struggling to enact reconciliation education is that emotions of trauma are often…

In this essay, the author attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Despite some literature addressing the consequences of nostalgia in the context of teaching, little has been done towards…