Ethics Of Discomfort Research Articles

Witnesses to inhumanity on shifting terrain: Embracing an ethic of discomfort for optimal learning in an international field course

This paper examines the written reflections of 30 Canadian undergraduate students who participated in an international field course focusing on migration and human rights in Mexico. It endeavors to understand how the students reconciled their thoughts and feelings about trauma and oppression in an intercultural setting. Borrowing Foucault’s ‘ethic of discomfort’, which emphasizes the proactive and transformative potential of discomfort in education, the paper extends existing scholarship in teaching and learning around study abroad and social justice by focusing on ethically complex situations in the field. The findings reveal that while preparation for unprecedented and unforeseeable scenarios during an international field course was challenging for faculty, exposing students to the realities of migration ultimately facilitated learning.

Staying with discomfort: Early childhood teachers’ emotional themes in relation to children's peer-culture aggression

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.

An Ethics of Discomfort

This essay traces the evolution of Katherine Dunham’s relationship with Haiti through archival research and a consideration of her 1969 ethnographic memoir, Island Possessed. It argues that primitivist discourses framing Vodou as an instinctive capacity latent in all people of African origins provided interwar black artists such as Dunham with a tantalizing possibility of Pan-African solidarity through which they could mobilize their desire for connection with an obscured past and an imagined community in the present. When Dunham found her 1930s fieldwork inevitably run aground on the wall of cultural difference, however, her initial feelings of discomfort in Haiti transformed her writing into an interrogation of the supposedly innate and homogeneous nature of blackness. The language and praxis of Vodou proved flexible enough to provide her with the vocabulary to articulate a more nuanced version of diasporic blackness beyond her preconceived notions of an easy or automatic alliance between all black people.

Queering policing: what is best practice with LGBTQ communities?

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the notion of best practice policing with LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) communities. Rather than wholeheartedly endorsing this notion, however, this paper is driven by the discussion of questioning moments that emerged from a number of Australian research projects focused on how police interact with LGBTQ people and from other moments of discussion about how we ought to counsel recruits to interact with LGBTQ people in police training. Using a queer, poststructural theoretical framework, and filtered through an ethics of discomfort, the paper works through these questioning moments that I have experienced as a researcher doing work that seeks to define LGBTQ-police relations and to better elaborate best practice. The analysis highlights the slipperiness of the idea of best practice and questions whether or not it is actually feasible and achievable. It also presents as a warning to policing stakeholders of becoming too comfortable with stipulating processes and practices of best practice policing with LGBTQ people into the future.

Ethic of discomfort: is asking for nude lipstick racist?

Teaching about culturally embedded racism can be difficult. Developing concepts to reframe deeply inscribed racial beliefs and attitudes is one necessary step, but illustrating cultural racism can be even more important. Effective examples invite behavioural change and significantly improved understanding. Lipstick and nail polish practices are commonly naturalised by many Western young women as normal and desirable, simply matters of individual and private choice. However, challenging students about using terms such as ‘nude’ or ‘skin-coloured’ raises both conceptual and personal behavioural aspects of cultural racism. Students resistant or indifferent to the idea that racism in Australia is significant or relevant today, and personally sure they are not racist, can be drawn deeper into class discussion via the question posed in this article’s title. Challenging these highly personal practices by reframing what they mean, almost literally (not quite) gets under students’ skin, their self-certainty is disturbed and learning can begin.

Tending toward friendship: LGBTQ sexualities in US schools

In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths. Drawing on Foucault’s (1996) interview, ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ we explore participants’ stories of friendship as heralding ‘new relational modes’ that chart a liminal space between family and sexuality. These relational modes of friendship disrupt the familiar trope of the ‘ally’ in anti-bullying programs and complicate what empirical research on LGBTQ youth calls, ‘peer social support.’ Theorizing friendship allows LGBTQ sexuality in schools to reside in an ethics of discomfort, which accommodates complex social relations and varied forms of desire, intimacy, and yearning.

Betraying Identities in Mourning with an Ethic of Discomfort

Contemporary practices of grieving those lost to war violence are largely framed by epistemological assumptions that often essentialize the identities of both the dead and those mourning. In addressing the desirability of these identity categories through a critical examination of contemporary practices, I draw on Foucault’s ethic of discomfort to foreground the contingent and the singular that are often obfuscated by practices of mourning and memorialization. If, instead of conflating selfhood and grieving, identities in mourning can be viewed in their contingency as the decision to grieve in certain ways, practices of mourning can facilitate an undoing of the identity politics in play. Ultimately, I argue, we must risk ourselves in ways that surpass the utility of the contemporary identity politics surrounding mourning by refusing the current practices that define expectations regarding intelligible forms of grieving those lost to war violence. It is in the risk of betraying our loved ones in those solidified identities that allow us to rethink the requirements for moral responsibility in ways that undo, rather than solidify, identity categories within practices of grieving. In doing so, we can begin to explore potential for ridding ourselves of claims that stratify and separate communities through an identity politics and claims that justify the use of violence and domination in the preservation of those identities.

Schooling Food in Contemporary Times: Taking Stock

AbstractOver the past decade we have witnessed a proliferation and intensification of food pedagogies across a range of sites. This article begins by considering two pedagogical scenes that attempt to address food. They were enacted within educational settings in Australia; one a Year 8 (13 years of age) health education classroom, the other a professional learning seminar. Each were heavily imbued with the obesity prevention imperatives that have come to characterise social, political and educational discourse around food in contemporary times. Using these scenes as a springboard, we move to consider the place where we initially envisioned food might intersect with environmental education. We imagined that it would be a space with significant potential for approaching teaching and learning about food in new ways. Deploying menu as metaphor, the authors explore the possibilities for this new terrain and argue that bringing a Foucauldian inspired ‘ethics of discomfort’ to the table might help us take stock of contemporary approaches and their effects. Given the dominance of crisis-driven responses that tend to characterise school food education, we conclude by suggesting that we need to interrupt the dominant discourses that circulate around food and try to engage with some new possibilities for teaching and learning about food.

Fat Studies 101: Learning to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Fat Studies 101: Learning to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: the tensions of ethical violence in social justice education

This essay considers the ethical implications of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort, using as a point of departure Butler's reflections on ethical violence and norms. The author shows how this attempt is full of tensions that cannot, if ever, be easily resolved. To address these tensions, the author first offers a brief overview of the notion of pedagogy of discomfort and discusses its relevance with Foucault's idea of ‘ethic of discomfort’ and the promise of ‘safe classroom.’ Then, he focuses on Butler's account of ethical violence and norms to show how the subject's constitution and regulation are inextricably linked to violence in several ways. In the final part of the paper, the author turns more specifically to the ways in which a pedagogy of discomfort might entail ethical violence, suggesting how the turn to a nonviolent ethics might become possible or whether the ethical resonances of that challenge will always entail a degree of ambivalence.

The emotional work of discomfort and vulnerability in multicultural teacher education

This study documents our efforts to implement an ‘ethic of discomfort’ and a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in our undergraduate multicultural teacher education courses. Commitments to these moral imperatives inherently involve emotional work for teacher candidates and teacher educators. Such emotional work, particularly in academia, is often invisible and disincentivized. This study examines the following: (1) grappling with students’ emotional reactions that stem from discomfort, (2) engaging in public emotional discourses, (3) negotiating the political dimensions of teaching diverse students, and (4) remaining emotionally available to students as they work through these ideas in their own lives. The implications of this study address the types of preparation and support teacher educators need to facilitate the transformative potential of a pedagogy and an ethic of discomfort. While pre-service teacher education is considered a safe and productive learning space for students to be discomforted, questions are posed regarding the safety for pre-tenured teacher educators involved in this process. We offer a typology of emotional work from a teacher educator perspective in teaching multicultural education.

The Comfort of International Criminal Law

This paper examines the changing relationship between the disciplines of international criminal law (ICL) and international human rights law; I particularly focus on the associations of the former with comfort and the latter with discomfort. It appears that a shift may be taking place in that ICL is being refashioned from a field enforcing human rights law to one which has assumed an entirely independent status. Indeed, ICL appears to be crowding out international human rights law. The inquiry begins with the question whether ICL is becoming the preferred discursive framework for practitioners, academics, and politicians. A contemporary desire for certainty over contention, action over discourse, and simplicity over complexity is revealed; in short, a preference for comfort over discomfort. The second half of the paper is dedicated to highlighting some of the concerns attached to this preference and suggesting possible techniques for addressing these concerns. Employing the idea of ‘discomfort’, I refer to the relevance of (1) Michel Foucault’s Ethics of Discomfort, (2) Judith Butler’s idea of the Language of Discomfort, and (3) draw on Franz Kafka’s literary exploration of the Comfort in Discomfort. The ideas culminate in a call for relearning the comfort in discomfort of contention, discourse and complexity in international law.

A Reparative Reading of a Confessional Narrative of ‘Inclusion’: Working within an ‘Ethic of Discomfort’

A Reparative Reading of a Confessional Narrative of ‘Inclusion’: Working within an ‘Ethic of Discomfort’

An Illusory Interiority: Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion

It is generally accepted that the notion of inclusion derived or evolved from the practices of mainstreaming or integrating students with disabilities into regular schools. Halting the practice of segregating children with disabilities was a progressive social movement. The value of this achievement is not in dispute. However, our charter as scholars and cultural vigilantes () is to always look for how we can improve things; to avoid stasis and complacency we must continue to ask, how can we do it better? Thus, we must ask ourselves uncomfortable questions and develop a critical perspective that Foucault characterised as an ‘ethic of discomfort’ (, p. xxvi) by following the Nietzschean principle where one acts ‘counter to our time and thereby on our time ... for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche, 1874, p. 60 in , p. xxvi). This paper begins with a fundamental question for those participating in inclusive education research and scholarship—when we talk of including, into what do we seek to include?