In this paper presentation I intend to present a developed part of my PhD thesis from 2016 (planed re-publlication by Eskaton during spring 2017). In my thesis Det omöjliga vittnandet: om vittnesmålets pedgogiska möjligheter (The Impossibile Witnessing : On the Pedagogical Possibilities of Testimony) I develop a phenomenon that society at large, but also philosophy and education have great interest in; namely the phenomenon of testimony and witnessing.

In my thesis I investigate what testimonies and the act of witnessing can do in relation to education. More specifically, I investigate what kind of pedagogical possibilities there are in witnessing and testimony, in relation to teaching as well as outside schools. I do this by focusing on three different aspects (of these phenomena), namely representation, subjectivity and emotion. Three aspects that relate to the phenomenon of testimony – but also have bearing on the daily life and work of teaching. In the paper presentation at ECER I will focus on one of these aspects; namely on emotions.

Within educational research, testimony is used to understand and develop epistemological, political or ethical thinking. Educational research shows how the use of testimony in teaching can carry on opportunities for students to create various teaching related positive values, such as a historical consciousness or an ethical approach to the world and other people, or how being exposed to various testimonies could bring about feelings and emotions - or even crises. These feelings or crises can be the starting point towards dealing with historical traumas, and through that be the basis for knowledge of history, including histories of those different from oneself and/or from other parts of the world. Testimonies carry the idea of being singular and to be “true” stories, this is why students and pupils exposed to testimonies are also considered of value when working with historical trauma and attempting to bring consciousness and personal ethical reflection.

For example, Felman and Laub (1991) write how the encountering with the literary testimonies may involve a learning situation where students who are exposed to testimonies become emotionally involved, and by that, the students can be taught. Felman and Laub examine the relationship between students’ crises and pedagogy, and consider the emotions and personal crisis as an opportunity for learning. It is by being deeply affected by testimony that the students can learn something.

In this paper presentation I therefore develop and gives a critique of the idea that emotions and personal crisis are possible ways for teaching and for learning to develop moral compasses or as ways to work towards social justice.

For clarification. in the thesis, and paper presentation, I examine the pedagogical possibilities of testimony and witnessing based on the idea that such possibilities are situated in human imperfection and lack of ability, where the knowledge is placed in the impossibility, in our not-knowing. This dialectical understanding, drawing on Giorgio Agamben (1999), implies a different formulation than previous research, by highlighting the impossibility of witnessing and of testimony, for example by how the testimony does not stand outside the political, and in Western society more specifically, the capitalist system.

Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities : collected essays in philosophy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ahmed, Sara, och Jackie Stacey. Thinking through the skin. London: Routledge, 2001. Felman, Shoshana & Laub, Dori. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Att rätta orätt. Hägersten: Tankekraft, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the subaltern speak? I: Cary Nelson och Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the interpretation of culture, Communications and culture (Houndmills: Macmillan Education, 1988). Todd, Sharon. Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education. State University of New York Press, 2003. The Latina Feminist Group. Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Zembylas, Michalinos & McGlynn, Claire. ”Discomforting pedagogies: emotional tensions, ethical dilemmas and transformative possibilities”. British Educational Research Journal 38, nr 1 (01 februari 2012): 41–59. Zembylas, Michalinos. ”‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: the tensions of ethical violence in social justice education”. Ethics and Education 10, nr 2 (04 maj 2015): 163–74.