Lee, Soyoung; (2020) Poetics of Alterity: Education, Art, Politics. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines a dominant way of thinking that presents itself as control. Such thinking prevails in education, especially where societies are driven by achievement and characterised by the discourse of efficiency. I suggest that this way of thinking inevitably blocks the other – that is, the radically other, which cannot be absorbed or assimilated into the same. The thesis explores ways in which what escapes our grip has an important bearing on education, including on such matters as the consideration of curriculum content. Art and the humanities will be seen as significant spaces where alterity presents and expresses itself, asking for our singular response. Works of art, for example, require us to be sensitive to what we cannot fully comprehend or contain; they unsettle and even disturb our accustomed ways of thinking. Poetic language is the exemplar: characteristically, it resists rigidity and consolidation, and cannot be reduced to merely instrumental purposes. It breaks the closed circle of economies of thought that would insulate themselves from an outside. The aim of this thesis is, by way of exploring such language, to search for and preserve places for alterity, as places that education and philosophy can find themselves again. I attempt to show that acknowledgement of the other should condition not only the practice of teaching and learning but also the practicalities of our social and political lives. Recovering the vitality of language will be seen as a resisting force against the impersonal, neutralised, and neutered language of control. In the end, it is through this that we can affirm the tensions and aporetic problems we encounter in our lives, particularly in teaching. Such affirmation enables the recovery of responsibility in what we say and do, where this is less to do with seeking security and much more a matter of faith.

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