Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Environmental education and environmental advocacy have a contentious relationship. In this article, the author argues that there will always be uncertainty about educationally appropriate responses to controversial issues. Although uncertainty is inherent in this task, the choices are not dichotomous. The author also argues that education suggests a fluidity of meaning that shifts across a range of contexts, and what needs to be done will be found on a case-by-case and context-by-context basis in a mediated and negotiated third space. Some tentative guide-posts are offered.

Environmental Education and Environmental Advocacy: Revisited

This article builds on qualitative research with 13 women (9 from Canada and 4 from Asia and Africa) doing international adult education in the Global South. The author examines the cases in light of the postcolonial literature of Bhabha, Spivak, and Khan, giving special attention to their theory of third space. The 13 participants are third-space practitioners who challenge the binaries of North/South, religion/development, and local/global. As development workers and educators, these women trouble existing categories of identity to practice progressive politics in the public sphere through third-space strategies of ritual, listening, negotiation, and subversion. This article’s main contribution is to show how these adult educators use and practice this radical position within the shifting (postfoundational) sands that are so often denounced as apolitical, noncommittal, or lost in linguistics.

Third-Space Practitioners: Women Educating for Justice in the Global South.

In North America’s large multiethnic cities, the percentage of foreign-born children isconstantly rising. The proﬁle of these migrants has changed considerably over the past fewdecades (Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 1995). While in the 1960s, most of them camefrom Europe, the majority of recently arrived children and adolescents, whether refugeesor immigrants, now come from countries in which there is an internationally recognizedform of organized violence, due either to a repressive regime responsible for major social´tensions or to internal armed conﬂict.Thedramaworkshopprogramdescribedherewasdesignedtofacilitatetheadjustmentofnewlyarrivedteens.Itwasdevelopedforhighschoolsandfollowsuponcreativeexpressionworkshops for the same population in elementary schools. The aim of the program is tomake it easier for adolescents to adjust to their new environment through creative groupworkinvolvingidentityissuesrelatedtobeingmigrantsandmembersofculturalminorities.The program also seeks to improve intergroup relations in multiethnic schools.Beforedescribingtheworkshopprogram,wewillﬁrstbrieﬂydiscusssomeofthefeaturesspeciﬁctomigrationinadolescence,andinparticular,theimportanceofidentityissuesatthispoint in the life cycle. We will then review the drama therapy experiences that inspired ourown program. Last, we will describe the various activities in the program, with a qualitativeassessment of its effects on the adolescents who took part.

Playing with identities and transforming shared realities: drama therapy workshops for adolescent immigrants and refugees

This study compares the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. Despite important contextual sociopolitical and historical differences, both case studies similarly deviate from the reductionist descendant profile of the pathological, publicly enlisted witness in search of redemptive testimonial voice. Findings thereby allow for a grounded deconstruction of the Euro-Western universalized semiotics of suffering. Set against the above similarities, key differences between Khmer and Jewish self-perceived sense of vulnerability/empowerment, lived experiences of memory and forgetting, and genocide-related moral modes of being not only challenge key axioms in the scholarship and in humanitarian practice but raise epistemological concerns regarding the constitutive role of cultural worldviews often marginalized in sociopolitical analyses.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668449

Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies

In this article I explore the development of a critical pedagogy that interrogates commonly held assumptions about identity and culture in social, political, and historical perceptions of cultural difference. I attempt to deconstruct dichotomizing tendencies of thinking about differences, with the aim to position thinking in the borderland or on the fault line between cultures, a "third space" in which to live critically. I examine perspectives of critical consciousness, third-space positionings, and dialogic negotiations of differences through the lenses of feminist theory, narrative enquiry, and literary theory to suggest how these perspectives may lead to cross-cultural identifications or understandings in postsecondary classrooms. The responsibility for the tracing of the "other" within self is seen as central to teaching practice, in order to live, as T. Minh-ha Trinh (1989b) states: "fearlessly with and within difference(s)" (p. 84).

Rishma Dunlop

Papers

Beyond Dualism: Towards a Dialogic Negotiation of Difference.