Chapter 10 - Re-visioning the Sentimental in Pedagogical Discourse and Practice

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to use necropolitics and sentimentality as theoretical entry points to broaden understandings of death as a form of power against subjugated (e.g. Black, migrant, refugee) lives. This theorizing is approached through the dilemma of showing or not showing dead-body images in the classroom as an ethical, political and pedagogical intervention. This intervention entails numerous challenges such as: the risk of traumatizing students; the danger of superficializing colonial histories, structural racism, and contemporary geopolitical complicities producing such deaths; and, the challenge of finding productive ways to respond pedagogically to the emotionally difficult spaces of learning that are created, without sentimentalizing death. The analysis makes an attempt to reclaim the entangled meanings of necropolitics and sentimentality in pedagogical discourse and practice by re-visioning the sentimental in ways that interrogate the normalization of death-making in the current political climate.