| Summary: | Educators are traditionally expected to provide safe, supportive and caring learning spaces for students. Yet some educational theorists suggest that, if educators seek to disrupt oppression, they must call on students to step outside of their comfort zones to acknowledge and question how one’s privilege implicates one in the oppression of others. Megan Boler and Kevin Kumashiro are two scholars who question the desirability of comfortable learning spaces. Both theorists build upon Shoshana Felman’s use of testimonies of trauma to invite or lead students into discomfort or crisis. But what are the ethical implications of this approach to education? The purpose of this study was to undertake an ethical inquiry into Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort and Kumashiro’s pedagogy of crisis.
This inquiry applied the conceptual framework of Judith Butler, particularly her conception of ethical violence, in order to critique these pedagogies. Butler suggests that subjects are required to appropriate certain discursive norms in order to be considered intelligible human beings. When a subject is unable to appropriate such a norm, that norm is said to be ethically violent. According to Butler, dominant ethical discourses require subjects to present an autonomous, coherent self in order to be considered intelligible. Butler argues that this norm is inappropriable, because subjects are constitutively dependent and incoherent, and thus inflicts ethical violence.
This study considered if and how Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort and Kumashiro’s pedagogy of crisis risk inflicting ethical violence upon students. The principal conclusion was that, left unchecked, the use of testimony in pedagogies of discomfort and crisis risks inflicting ethical violence if students are required to give responses to testimonies of trauma that present an autonomous, coherent self. Narrative responses to testimonies of trauma also risk functioning as a mode for governing students’ subjectivities. Based on this finding, the author suggests ways that educators may minimize, if not eliminate, ethical violence in pedagogies of discomfort and crisis.
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