Michalinos Zembylas Research Articles

Recovering Anticolonialism as an Intellectual and Political Project in Education

AbstractIn this essay, Michalinos Zembylas revisits the tension between decolonization and other social justice projects in education scholarship, focusing in particular on the arguments for and against the notion of decolonization as land return. While different colonized communities are justifiably projecting their own political priorities in struggles against specific colonial forms of domination, Zembylas argues that education as scholarship and practice would be well served to recover the anticolonial as a shared intellectual and political project for understanding the different practices and experiences of resistance to colonialism and imperialism around the world. Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions. Instead of seeing different political projects as competing against one another — e.g., by considering social justice projects that do not prioritize land return as misguided or misplaced — anticolonialism seeks to theorize and act against a broad range of colonial practices and by‐products that include racism, militarism, resources exploitation, land dispossession, and so on.

The Affective Dimension Of Epistemic Injustice

AbstractThis essay focuses on the affective dimension of epistemic injustice — specifically, the affective harms and burdens of epistemic injustice on individuals and groups — and examines how pedagogy may help disrupt the affective injustice that epistemic injustice entails. This theorization facilitates the ability to recognize that affective wrongs are not separate from epistemic wrongs but are instead embedded in them. Here, Michalinos Zembylas brings recent philosophical inquiry on affective injustice into conversation with considerations of epistemic injustice in order to discuss how affect‐related conceptions of epistemic injustice help education scholars to illuminate the entanglement of the epistemic and the affective in the wrongs of testimonial, hermeneutical, and other forms of epistemic injustice. His analysis outlines how some theoretical concepts concerning “affective goods” — including affective freedoms, affective resources, and affective recognition — have important pedagogical implications for the role educators can play in rupturing epistemic‐affective injustices.

Dewey's Account of Habit through the Lens of Affect Theory

AbstractIn this essay Michalinos Zembylas attempts to formulate a conceptual framework that enables educators and policymakers to articulate an alternative formulation of habit in education spaces. In particular, he explores how theorizing affect, habit, and social change as entangled may enable a rethinking of the concept of habit and foster new ideas about how to cultivate possibilities of social transformation in schools. For this purpose, Zembylas brings into conversation literatures on John Dewey's account of habit and affect theory; both literatures explore the productive potential of creating new habits of social change that nurture alternative types of affective relations and possibilities for social transformation. Also, the theorization of habit as collective rather than individual is both a potentially radical political move and also one that opens new possibilities for reformulating habit in pedagogy and education policy: specifically, it turns our attention to actions and practices that see change as working through “mind–body–environmental assemblages” and that understand “progress” as an ongoing process of experimentation in the present, rather than an ideal for the distant future.

Nancy Fraser and participatory parity: Reframing social justice in South African higher education, edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Dorothee Hölscher, and Michalinos Zembylas

In this review of Nancy Fraser and participatory parity: Reframing social justice in South African higher education, edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Dorothee Hölscher, and Michalinos Zembylas, book reviewer Sergio Celis discusses why this book is an invitation to reimagine our participation in the higher education field, as scholars, teachers, and citizens.

Posthumanism, education and decolonization: A conversation with Michalinos Zembylas

The work of creating decolonized futures has been a particularly important undertaking in educational contexts, for which posthumanist and new materialist theories provide useful insights. Yet, how decolonization is to be achieved and whose responsibility it is remains up for discussion. This intra-view focuses on the tensions between decolonizing practices and posthumanism, and their implications foreducation: What can(’t) these theories do to decolonize education? And how do weengage in posthuman practices in education without overstepping, appropriating, or (re)colonizing Indigenous epistemologies? Thinking through these questions, in this intra-view we engage in a conversation with Michalinos Zembylas.

Just(ice) Do It! Re-membering the Past through co-Affective Aesthetic Encounters with Art/ History

This chapter explores how art history pedagogies can be put to work with the ghosts of colonialism and apartheid in such a way as to forge new affective relationalities within South African Higher Education (SAHE). Drawing on an art history pedagogical encounter that engages history and memory, the chapter proposes that it is through speaking with ghosts, that educators and students can respond to calls to decolonise the academy and work affirmatively with difference(s). To this end, the paper threads Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology and Michalinos Zembylas's pedagogies of hauntology through the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Bracha Ettinger, three feminist theorists who explore notions of both/and conceptions of difference(s) and share a common understanding of subjectivity as partial, co-affecting and co-emerging. In so doing, the paper addresses the ambivalences and complexities of art history pedagogies and argues that speaking with and responding to the ghost can generate new relationalities within SAHE and society at large.

Can ambivalence hold potential for fat activism? An analysis of conflicting discourses on fatness in the Finnish column series Jenny’s Life Change

ABSTRACTIn 2017, a publicly funded, nationwide campaign called the Scale Rebellion set out to address fatness through body positivity and fat activism in Finland, with a fat woman named Jenny Lehtinen having a particularly visible role as its figurehead. Some critics of the campaign maintained that Lehtinen’s communication lacked focus and was self-contradicting, especially concerning her wish to lose weight. I conducted discourse analysis of a pertinent element of the Scale Rebellion campaign, a 13-part column series called Jenny’s Life Change, written by Lehtinen herself. The findings suggest that diverse, conflicting discourses on fatness are indeed present in her texts; of these, I have named anti-“obesity,” fatphobic, size acceptance, and societal discourses. However, in line with scholars such as Michalinos Zembylas, I argue that Lehtinen’s conflicting messaging on fatness is not (only) an expression of her personal opinions but in fact linked to ambivalent fatness discourses circulating in Finnish society and abroad. Further, Samantha Murray has noted that fat activism would do well in welcoming the multivocality often present in (narratives on) fatness, since ambivalence might actually contain potential. One such possibility is the very observation that ambivalence vis-à-vis fatness is not necessarily a sign of being a sell-out or a “fake” fat activist. Instead, it is an indication that at a time when fatness is a stigmatized trait, almost everyone is exposed to conflicting messages about it. Therefore fat activists’ ambivalence in relation to fatness should not be judged but rather seen in this larger context.

Comparative Education ReviewGuide to Searching for World Literature 2017

Previous articleNext article No AccessBibliographic EssayComparative Education Review Guide to Searching for World Literature 2017Kathryn Anderson-LevittKathryn Anderson-Levitt Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 61, Number 4November 2017 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693961 Views: 286Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryReceived July 13, 2017Revised July 13, 2017Accepted July 13, 2017Published online October 18, 2017 © 2017 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Kevin Kester, Michalinos Zembylas, Loughlin Sweeney, Kris Hyesoo Lee, Soonjung Kwon, Jeongim Kwon Reflections on decolonizing peace education in Korea: a critique and some decolonial pedagogic strategies, Teaching in Higher Education 26, no.22 (Jul 2019): 145–164.https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1644618Kathryn Anderson-Levitt Comparative Education Review Guide to Searching for World Literature 2019, Comparative Education Review 63, no.44 (Oct 2019): 633–640.https://doi.org/10.1086/705466Noah W. Sobe Problematizing Comparison in a Post-Exploration Age: Big Data, Educational Knowledge, and the Art of Criss-Crossing, Comparative Education Review 62, no.33 (May 2018): 325–343.https://doi.org/10.1086/698348

Toward re-thinking science education in terms of affective practices: reflections from the field

Rational and operationalized views of science and what it means for teachers and students to know and enact legitimate science practices have dominated science education research for many decades (Fusco and Barton in J Res Sci Teach 38(3):337–354, 2001. doi:10.1002/1098-2736(200103)38:3 3.0.CO;2-0). Michalinos Zembylas challenges historically prevalent dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotion, and emotion/affect, calling researchers and educators to move beyond the Cartesian dualisms, which have perpetuated a myth of scientific objectivity devoid of bias, subjectivity and emotions. Zembylas (Crit Stud Teach Learn 1(1):1–21, 2013. doi:10.14426/cristal.v1i1.2) contends that the role of emotions and affect are best understood as relational and entangled in epistemological, cultural, and historical contexts of education, which represent contested sites of control and resistance. We argue that Zembylas’ work is pivotal since “theoretical frames of reference for doing research in science education…[and] what constitutes knowledge and being within a particular frame” carry material bearings over the enactments of science teaching and learning (Kyle in J Res Sci Teach 31:695–696, 1994, p. 321. doi:10.1002/tea.3660310703). In this paper, we hold cogen dialogue about how re-thinking notions of emotion and affect affords us, both science educators and researchers, to re-envision science education beyond cognitive and social frames. The framing of our dialogue as cogen builds on Wolff-Michael Roth and Kenneth Tobin’s (At the elbows of another: learning to teach through coteaching. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2002) notion of cogenerative dialogue. Holding cogen is an invitation to an openly dialogic and safe area, which serves as a space for a dialogic inquiry that includes radical listening of situated knowledges and learning from similarities as well as differences of experiences (Tobin in Cult Stud Sci Educ, in review, 2015). From our situated experiences reforms, colleges of education, schools, and curriculum place not enough emphasis on affective and bodily dimensions of teaching and learning. Instead, the privilege seems to be given to reason, evidence, and rationalities, which continue to reinforce dominant ways of knowing and experiencing. The separation of mind and body, reason and emotion, effect and affect in teaching and research might bear unintended and negative consequences for many children and teachers who are engaged in bodily and affective forms of learning science. In this forum we wish to expand on the discussion to consider the interdependent nature of learning, experience, and affect by drawing on our work with science teachers and culturally and linguistically diverse students, juxtaposed alongside Zembylas’ reflections, to further theorize the affective turn in science education.

Encountering science education’s capacity to affect and be affected

What might science education learn from the recent affective turn in the humanities and social sciences? Framed as a response to Michalinos Zembylas’s article, this essay draws from selected theorizing in affect theory, science education and science and technology studies, in pursuit of diverse and productive ways to talk of affect within science education. These discussions are framed by desires to transcend traditional epistemic boundaries and practices. The article concludes offering some associated ambiguities and tensions involved.

Conceptualizing Emotions in Social Studies Education

This review of research investigates how the field of social studies education conceptualizes emotions within its literature. Analysis indicates a lack of theoretical and empirical engagement with emotions, even when the presence of emotions is explicitly acknowledged. Drawing on Michalinos Zembylas’s framework for researching emotions in education, the authors reveal multiple conceptions of emotions undergird research and practice, yet these are largely unexamined in the literature. The complicated nature of emotions requires careful attention, and attempting to understand the roles they play in teaching and learning provides significant opportunities for growth in social studies research and practice.

Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond by Zvi Bekerman and Michalinos Zembylas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 272 pp. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-521-76689-0.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewTeaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond by Zvi Bekerman and Michalinos Zembylas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 272 pp. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-521-76689-0.Karen RossKaren Ross Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 58, Number 1February 2014 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674169 Views: 82Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Yong Tang Contested Narratives at the Hanwang Earthquake Memorial Park: Where Ghost Industrial Town and Seismic Memorial Meet, Geoheritage 11, no.22 (May 2018): 561–575.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-018-0309-9

Pedagogies of Hauntology in History Education: Learning to Live with the Ghosts of Disappeared Victims of War and Dictatorship

AbstractMichalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of “hauntology,” that is, as an ongoing conversation with the “ghost” — in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for deconstructing the orthodoxies of academic history thinking and learning about “the disappeared.” As metaphor, hauntology evokes the figure of the ghost in order both to trouble the hegemonic status of representational modes of knowledge in remembrance practices and to undermine their ontological frames and ideological histories. As pedagogical methodology, hauntology reframes histories of loss and absence and uses them as points of departure to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions that emerge from haunting. Pedagogies of hauntology are constituted as responses to “spectacle pedagogy” in teaching about the disappeared, that is, a ubiquitous form of representation that manifests the ghosts in a sensationalized and ideological manner.

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

Handling challenge and becoming a teacher: an analysis of teachers’ narration about life competence education

This article takes an interest in how teachers handle new challenges. The challenge in focus is a nonmandatory yet widespread subject in Swedish education called Livskunskap, Life Competence Education (LCE). The purposes of the present study are to identify and discuss notions of being a teacher actualized in teachers’ narratives about the challenge of LCE, and to discuss how narration may help teachers to handle and reflect upon professional challenges. Seven teachers were interviewed about their experiences from teaching LCE. The analysis showed how acts of defending, exploring, presenting, or resisting LCE were performed in the teachers’ narratives. LCE seems to actualize a narrative tension between two dominant aspects of teacher identity. On the one hand, there is an image of a socially committed teacher who cares about the emotional well-being of and relations to his/her students. On the other hand, there is an image of a knowledge-oriented teacher who connects with the students mainly by focusing on subject matters. Drawing upon the theoretical work, mainly by Michalinos Zembylas, I found that the teachers had opportunities to use narration as an arena for personal agency, but these opportunities were not necessarily taken in the present narratives.

MATERIAL SPECTERS: INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS, DISASTER MANAGEMENT, AND EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS

In this essay, Marianna Papastephanou discusses three books—Michalinos Zembylas's The Politics of Trauma in Education; Sigal Ben‐Porath's Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict; and Kenneth Saltman's Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools—from the perspective of the material causality of conflict and of the significance this might have for conflict resolution and the role that education may play in it. Setting out from the Derridean standpoint of spectrality, Papastephanou explores divergences and convergences of Zembylas's critical emotional praxis, Ben‐Porath's counterposition of belligerent and expansive citizenship education, and Saltman's critique of educational programs that capitalize on natural disasters and wars. Papastephanou examines various operations of ontology in an interplay with hauntology (to use Jacques Derrida's terminology) and thus puts forward a critical approach to the contribution of each perspective.

Peace Education in Conflict and Post‐conflict Societies: Comparative Perspectives edited by Claire McGlynn, Michalinos Zembylas, Zvi Bekerman, and Tony Gallagher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 274 pp. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN 978‐0230‐60842‐9.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewPeace Education in Conflict and Post‐conflict Societies: Comparative Perspectives edited by Claire McGlynn, Michalinos Zembylas, Zvi Bekerman, and Tony Gallagher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 274 pp. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN 978‐0230‐60842‐9.Andria Wisler and Claire AndersonAndria WislerGeorgetown University Search for more articles by this author and Claire AndersonGeorgetown University Search for more articles by this author Georgetown UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 54, Number 3August 2010 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655415 Views: 65Total views on this site © 2010 by The Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review of Michalinos Zembylas: The Politics of Trauma in Education

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.

Working toward the De‐essentialization of Identity Categories in Conflict and Postconflict Societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland

During the past decade, we have conducted research in our own countries, all of which are considered conflict or postconflict societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland. We have focused on a variety of topics related to peace education, reconciliation, and coexistence. Giving special emphasis to the formation of identity in educational settings, two of us have investigated primarily in integrated schools (in Israel and Northern Ireland), while the third has conducted research in multicultural schools (in Cyprus). We believe that a comparative study of these three settings is valuable because such juxtaposition helps to conceptualize how some aspects of identity are developed in practice in the countries in question (Phillips and Schweisfurth 2006). What has attracted our attention in this body of research are the dissimilar ways in which educators and children attend to identity issues when such issues appear in interactional events. Although educators, in their rhetoric and educational practices, often seem to essentialize ethnic or religious identity and mark events as related to absolute categories, children, though knowledgeable of these categories, seem less attentive to them in their social activities and construct their social worlds with less emphasis on ethnic or religious divisions. Regardless of the differences in identity found in the educational policies of Israel (emphasis on Zionist ethos), Northern Ireland (focus on pluralism), and Cyprus (priority on Greek-centered education), we have observed that, in practice, children’s perspectives differ from those of adult educators. In this article, we examine the ways in which educators engage in educational initiatives geared toward peace, coexistence, and/or conflict resolution and consider the implications for such initiatives if children’s perspectives were taken into consideration. We first summarize the similarities and differences with respect to the sources of conflict in the three societies. Then we offer short descriptions of the educational initiatives under examination and the sociopolitical con

MAKING SENSE OF TRAUMATIC EVENTS: TOWARD A POLITICS OF APORETIC MOURNING IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

Abstract In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas examines how the work of mourning can evoke public and school pedagogies that provide an alternative way of relating to otherness and trauma — not through remaining fixated on simply representing the other’s or one’s own trauma, but in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before suffering. A major concern is the normalization of mourning in school and public discourses through the establishment of boundaries between grievable and ungrievable lives. Zembylas argues that the violence unleashed through national mourning and the reproduction of loss through rituals of commemoration in schools raise important issues about the ethics and politics of mourning embedded in public and school pedagogies. Using two examples of the workings of mourning — one in the context of the South African reconciliation tribunals and the other in the context of collective mourning of Missing Persons in his home country of Cyprus — Zembylas demonstrates that the recognition of our common vulnerability to loss can form the groundwork of school and public pedagogies of aporetic mourning.