Abstract
This article discusses the relation between emotions and testimony, by asking the questions: What do emotions do? Are emotions possible and desirable starting points for teaching difficult and complex subjects such as injustice and historical wounds? This article explores the 2015 image and testimony of Alan Kurdi, lying on a beach of the Mediterranean Sea and the immense emotional response it elicited from the media. By critiquing emotions based on testimonies in teaching, by primarily following Ahmed (The cultural politics of emotion, Routledge, New York. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372, 2004) and Todd (Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2003), this article argues that emotions are cultural practices, not psychological states, and, thus, are relational. On this point, the argument is developed into two different movements, first, the effects offered by listening; second, opacity in relation to transparency, based on the thoughts of Glissant (Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997). The aspects of listening and opacity in relation to testimonies, in turn, yield an ambivalent space in which emotions play a role (regardless of whether or not that function is desired) in students encounter with testimonies and may, in turn, imply educational possibilities.
Highlights
Alan KurdiSome testimonies get more publicity than others
What are the educational potentialities of emotions? Is it possible and desirable for emotions to become starting points for teaching complex subjects, such as injustice and historical wounds?
What are the educational potentialities of emotions? There has been a lot of research theorizing the role of emotions in teaching complex subjects and testimony
Summary
Some testimonies get more publicity than others. One example of this is the image with Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach from September 2015, taken by the photographer Nilüfer Demir. Zembylas, Carniel or Gubkin do not reject emotions for the purpose of teaching, but they criticize the employment of emotions as a central point to impart the knowledge of past events that are traumatic and the use of emotions as the starting point of instructional discussions of difficult subjects They indicate the pitfalls of such teaching methodologies that do not consider the uniqueness of the student, the teacher or the historical testimony. This is something that I wish to develop further, by drawing on Zembylas, who on the one hand believes that educational initiatives beginning with emotion may miss the opacity required of students, and on the other hand, asserts in Five Pedagogies, a Thousand Possibilities that relational emotions, through their positive economy, can be a means of teaching and a way “... I will, first discuss my view on testimony and the role of testimony within teaching
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