How does ethics influence the myriad ways we engage difference within educational settings?

How does ethics influence the myriad ways we engage difference within educational settings?

Learning from the Other presents a philosophical investigation into the ethical possibilities of education, especially social justice education. In this original treatment, Sharon Todd rethinks the ethical basis of responsibility as emerging out of the everyday and complex ways we engage difference within educational settings. She works through the implications of the productive tension between the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. Challenging the idea that knowledge about the other is the answer to questions of responsibility, she proposes that responsibility is rooted instead in a learning from the other. The author focuses on empathy, love, guilt, and listening to highlight the complex nature of learning from difference and to probe where the conditions for ethical possibility might lie.

Sharon Todd is Professor of Education at Maynooth University in Ireland. Her many books include Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism and Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education, also published by SUNY Press.

Sharon Todd is Associate Professor of Education at York University and the editor of Learning Desire: Perspectives on Pedagogy, Culture, and the Unsaid.