Review of Michalinos Zembylas: The Politics of Trauma in Education

Abstract

For years now, I have been teaching a graduate course that examines complexities of witnessing past and present social suffering and trauma through literature, media, and the arts. Reading Michalinos Zembylas’ book, The Politics of Trauma in Education (2008), I am excited. Here is a text I can readily employ in my class that will do justice to the issues and tensions of this subject matter. For me, the experience of reading this book is like accessing the fine-tuning button on my radio. I imagine that a keen but still rather uninformed reader can move from static to clarity about key insights from the field and the full challenges and possibilities for educational engagements with trauma. A reader like me, who has been engaged with these issues for almost two decades, has the opportunity to refine his/her understanding and receive important new wisdom. With this book I am reminded of all we need to take into account and engage with when we teach. I am inspired and energized. The book invites readers to consider the psycho-social, political, and ethical dimensions of traumatic events and their implications for educational theory and practice. It particularly emphasizes the historical and political roles and registers of affect in hopes of creating greater awareness of how affectively charged investments can alternately divide and bring us closer to each other. Zembylas argues for a communal translation of trauma into a ‘‘critical emotional praxis’’ grounded in the interrogation of paradigms of thought that govern and perpetuate intercultural conflict (p. 2). Such praxis, he believes, can orient us to new means for overturning historical grammars of oppression. The praxis, he elaborates, then, constitutes a work of mourning that introduces and strengthens alternate, more just and compassionate ways of relating to each other as individuals, communities, and nations.