Keywords

In The power, passions, and perils of identity: On Chantal Mouffe, Remy Low offers an engaging and challenging critical thinking about his teaching and theoretical work on social (in)justice and the sociology of education. Low’s chapter shows how social (in)justice is not just a topic to teach about, but a matter for reflecting on students’ past and present positions in social structures and a way to draft different futures for them as teachers. The chapter is as much a theoretical contribution as an invitation to maintain the hope on change and social transformation.

The first section of the chapter presents an admirable work of (auto)ethnography combined with reflection on pedagogical practice for personal and professional purposes. The second section offers a good example of theory work and academic dialogue with the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe. The third section uses recent data from social neuroscience to support and expand Mouffe’s philosophical intuitions. The three sections are interconnected by a discussion on the personal, the academic, and the political engagements with theory. Low has chosen Mouffe’s work for its relevance to his field of interest and for the possibilities she offers to interact with concrete personal and professional issues. In his contribution, theory is not an abstract selection of a theoretical framework but a lived experience in permanent debate.

In reading the chapter I have three different reactions. The first section made me feel immediately connected with the topic, particularly with the discussion it opens on the implications of raising issues of social (in)justice in the classroom. Part of my teaching and research work is about political conflict and peacebuilding, and Low’s chronicle of a classroom discussion seems like it could be describing several of my own experiences. The second section invited me to engage with the main argument of the chapter about the possibilities for and limitations to understanding politics in terms of agonism rather than antagonism. Since how to deal with protracted conflicts is a matter of ongoing discussion in my academic and activist work, I felt a call to enter in dialogue with that section. The third section troubles me. Due to my work on gender and sexual politics, biological arguments cause me suspicion and extreme caution on how and for which purposes such data are raised.

I introduce these three feelings to argue that as much as the engagement with theory implies the rational procedures of evaluation of evidence and arguments, it also requires the acknowledgement of the emotional reactions triggered. Reading, discussing, and using theory involve a messy combination of empathy, attraction, desire, rejection, repulsion, or rage, just to mention some of those feelings. How to deal with such messiness and the discomfort it causes is for me one of the constant challenges in academic work.

The idea that a certain amount of discomfort is needed for theoretical development and for pedagogical practice can be found in several arenas from philosophical argumentation to critical pedagogies, where unsettling common understandings are required for transformative and emancipatory purposes (Freire, 1972; Hooks, 2006; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007). Calls for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ are raised in the teaching of social justice to facilitate the questioning of preconceptions and the positions of students in social structures (Boler, 1999); in decolonial perspectives on intercultural education to unsettle multiculturalist analyses of cultural conflict (Martínez Martínez, 2014); in the teaching of immigration issues in non-migrant contexts to discuss the complicity of whiteness with the status quo (Blum et al., 2021) or of racial inequalities in highly divided and racialised contexts (Leibowitz et al., 2010).

A pedagogy of discomfort can be even ‘enacted’ by those who are positioned as ‘others’ due to race, gender, or nationality to discuss the multiple and contradictory positioning in the pedagogical field (Lahiri-Roy et al., 2023). In all these examples, the ethical and political implications of using discomfort to raise some issues in the classroom are raised and dealt with the assumption that there is not a right or wrong way to do it, but the need for an ever-present discussion of and reflection on its implications.

I can see discomfort in Low’s chapter in several parts. It appears at first when interrogating his own response to the student who raised her experience of class inequalities in the classroom. As he expressed, is our acknowledgment of others when they share painful experiences a way to express empathy with them or to give us an escape path for an unsettling moment that is difficult to manage? He openly shares with the readers his personal and professional strategies to deal with such discomforting feelings and reminds us how much of our intellectual work is also a bodily work.

It is in fact in connection with the need to live with discomfort that Low introduces his interest in the work of Mouffe. Theory can be a model to explain social issues and a way to exorcise the problematic feelings we are left with when those issues are overwhelming and difficult to manage. In our choosing of theories there is as much of an assessment of their explanatory potential as of their possibilities to manage our own anxieties. That is clear in Low’s assessment of how helpful Mouffe’s analysis of identity dynamics has been in understanding and processing how students bring the social outside to the inside of the classroom. The reference to encountering her during his doctoral studies should not be left on the side. Is not pursuing doctoral studies a moment in our academic careers in which discomfort helps us advance our theoretical development and at the same time an everyday experience we struggle with for our own survival?

I read in the concerns presented by Low’s chapter a discussion on the ethical and political dilemmas of dealing with social (in)justice in pedagogical practices. As his initial vignette shows, those are not topics that show up suddenly when certain issues are included in a lesson or a module of the syllabus. They constitute the material and structural reality of the inside, the outside, and the in-between of formal and informal pedagogical spaces. Still, what are the effects and the implications of raising those topics in the classroom or in other pedagogical practices? If the ‘unleashing’ of those discussions can bring to the class an invigorating force as Low mentions, what is our responsibility in such an act? Once those forces are unleashed, what are we expecting to happen? Indeed, there are lots of theoretical value in using very challenging perspectives, such as Mouffe’s agonist approach to politics. But when we position them as a political possibility to deal with political conflict, is it just enough to name their place in certain theoretical debates as part of the lesson of the day? Those are core concerns in the pedagogies of discomfort that I would like to introduce in the conversation that I hope this response will open.

I entered in dialogue with the ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ in researching the politics and pedagogies of reconciliation in Colombia, Australia, and South Africa.Footnote 1 I was interested in discussing how reconciliation is presented to deal with past and present injustices, for whom and for which purposes. Reconciliation is indeed a very discomforting call, especially for those who have been suffering the effect of protracted conflicts and injustices. In exploring also if reconciliation can be taught and how, I encountered the work of education philosopher Michalinos Zembylas (2007, 2015, 2018). I was gripped by the side of his work that deals with issues of memory, history, and schooling in divided communities and the challenges of raising those topics in the classroom. In particular, I was confronted by his discussion about whether there is a certain kind of violence when creating discomfort for pedagogical purposes.

That idea resonates strongly with my own work. When I teach on gender, sexuality, and power or about sociopolitical violence in Colombia, I am often cautious about the examples I use, on the framing of the information I am presenting and on the purposes of doing it for the class objectives. I often explain that those topics may be not just data but the lived experience of some of the participants in the class, and therefore, we need to approach them with care, respect, and responsibility. Still, quite often such framing is not enough. Just recently, in class we were reading a chapter of the report of the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV, 2022). Some students were highly affected since what we were reading was very close to their own family stories. Sometimes, when discussing gender-based violence, I have had students who talk about their experiences as a way to raise consciousness with their peers. In doing that, they challenge the implicit protocols that evade talking about some personal experiences in the classroom. Ethics protocols and disclaimers in the syllabus or the pedagogical strategies we use to make the classroom a safe space can be useful, but not enough and problematic. As Dutta et al. (2016) argue, classroom safety strategies tend to be individualistic and put too much emphasis on students’ own management resources, rather than on collective critical and responsible engagement with difficult issues.

During 2021 and 2022 I have been leading with my research team three non-formal courses on politics and pedagogies of reconciliation for community leaders, public employees in charge of peacebuilding policies, international cooperation agents, and former guerrilla members participants in the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—FARC. We have opened conversations on the usefulness of an agonist perspective to conflict management with very contradictory results. As much as moving from antagonist towards agonist politics can be attractive for the call for reconciliation, participants often remind us that such movement happens in specific settings that give content to the call. Presenting a situation through a theoretical framework involves positions resulting from and constrained by the power relationships they intend to transform. Interestingly, the participants—that’s the word I think is missing here—in the classes brought the need to overcome a model of contentious politics based on the dichotomies, wanting instead to focus more on the politics of solidarity and collective engagement to rebuild war-torn communities.

There is something implicit in Low’s contribution that needs to be explicit and put on the table: as much as we need to take responsibility for unleashing forces that may lead to antagonism, or claim the need to move towards more agonist perspectives, it is also important to acknowledge the vulnerability it requires and causes. Low is right in interrogating his own fascination with Mouffe’s call for acting in the political arena as adversaries (agonism) and not as enemies (antagonism), since it seems harder to apply than to explain in the classroom. We can make others vulnerable with our theoretical claims. Engaging with theory requires both the recognition of our vulnerabilities to transform our own perspectives and strategies to manage that unleashed force.

It is far from my reach in this response to engage with the work of Chantal Mouffe. There is extensive work for and against her ideas. Using the strategy of offering a different reading of the same author or theory would be an interesting way to enter in dialogue with Remy Low’s chapter for testing the validity of his argument. I prefer to stay with his own reading to consider how, in the theoretical discussion of the utility of the dichotomy of antagonism/agonism and in the consideration of the ethical implications of the pedagogies of discomfort that we apply to teaching about social (in)justice, there is a common issue of interdependency and unequal power.

The classroom the Low describes at first is based on implicit and explicit agreements of interdependence that facilitate the sharing of and different ways of relating to experiences of injustice. As he describes, some students may share similar situations, some may feel in solidarity even if what is described is alien to them, and others may just sit browsing their mobiles and laptops. In leading discussions towards how to be ‘good teachers’ or good professionals in general, we can facilitate a movement towards a common ground and certain consensus. However, this can be based on representing others as the ‘bad’ ones and the ‘ones we don’t want to be’: maybe not enemies or adversaries, but those ‘we do not want to be like’. In Mouffe’s perspective, those who can engage in antagonist or agonist contentious politics have some resources that allow them to locate themselves in one or another possibilities. That is interdependence to maintain power imbalances.

As much as I can see discomfort as a permanent element in Low’s discussion as a lived experience that helps reflection, and as an analytical concept to expand the discussion and its ethics and politics, I need also to express my own discomfort with his last section. The pedagogies of discomfort are further invitations to deal with uneasy feelings, and using theory means using our feelings to advance and offer different perspectives on a similar issue. The last section of Low’s contribution deserves consideration especially because today biological arguments are used once again: by anti-gender politics (Corrêa, 2018; David & Roman, 2018; Kuhar & Zobec, 2017) to reinforce dichotomic gender/sexual orders and by certain sectors of feminism to include and exclude some from the category of women.

There is a long history of suspicion about biological arguments in the study of gender and sexual politics and in their activisms. Biological arguments have been used to reinforce the idea of ‘natural’ gender and sexual orders, to cast some life experiences as ‘unnatural’, and to support the lack of any consideration of a possible life. Sometimes biology can also be used in opposite ways, to claim the right to be who you want to be, since finally ‘you were born this way’. In both cases, biological arguments have a power that overloads their own words and that gives any evidence coming from that field a charge of reality that speaks for itself. Low is honest and clear in claiming that his reference to neuroscience and research on the oxytocin hormone does not intend to be the ‘killer argument’ against or in favour of Mouffe’s theoretical proposal.

The inclusion of such information, even if we as readers agree or disagree with it, opens another conversation on what we consider as evidence and how we present it in an argument. This is the shortest section of the chapter, yet it is the one with the most references to support the analysis, as if the nature of what is considered relevant ‘evidence’ was different from the previous sections of writing. Indeed, calling to the materiality of bodies as part of our need to understand the social and the political is a powerful call, that much more when discussing the ways in which we develop our affiliations and our senses of collectiveness, inclusion and exclusion—even more in contemporary politics, in which ‘polarisation’ has become a more common phenomenon and an explanatory category. Still, what are our intentions when dropping certain evidence or information that carries heavy weight amid a debate? Why might some readers, myself included, feel more connected with the personal initial narrative and more uncomfortable with the starkness of the scientific data?

Somehow, the same procedures involved in dealing with the passions that identity formation requires are present in our uses and support of one theory against other. Using theory is as much political as a political debate on the meanings of democracy. It also operates with similar procedures of passion, rationality, dispute, and tension. Theory work can create a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, just like identity politics. In the end, is not our relationship with theory and the way we use it a messy combination of antagonist and agonist politics?