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

A bstract 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.