Listening as Attending to the “Echo of the Otherwise”: On Suffering, Justice, and Education

Abstract

Listening to stories of suffering can be difficult, painful, and even traumatic. Yet listen we do and listen we must. If we do not hear or bear witness to these stories, then we are rendered incapable of responding, of answering for our or other’s actions, of taking a position of responsibility. Thus listening is central to the ways in which educational projects of social justice are conceived. Within these projects there is a legitimate focus on listening to the voices of the marginalized and the wounded, and on giving space and time to those groups to articulate their own experiences, struggles, dilemmas, and needs. In the context of teaching and learning encounters, students are often exposed to narratives that offer them radically different experiences from their own and when these experiences are marked by suffering, their responses can cut across a range of emotional registers: solidarity, pity, empathy, desire, identification, and guilt, to name a few. Such responses reveal some of the ways students “receive” the other and the degree to which they become hosts, as it were, to the other’s narrative presence.