Papers by James Stillwaggon
Philosophy of Education, 2018
Journal of curriculum theorizing, Sep 12, 2010
Philosophy of Education, 2015
's use of Louis C.K.'s anxiety concerning technology, overcome with the transience of aesthetic o... more 's use of Louis C.K.'s anxiety concerning technology, overcome with the transience of aesthetic objects and all too aware of the emptiness that lies beneath, remarkably reflects and provides contemporary context for Soren Kierkegaard's account of despair. Nonetheless, C.K.'s response to the emptiness of aesthetic pursuits demonstrates a failure of ethical life by Kierkegaard's exacting standards. C.K.'s humor, as a partial solution to his anxiety, falls under the lowest category of Kierkegaardian ethics, namely, irony, or continuing to live in the world and accept its demands while refusing to be implicated by it, claiming exception to human flaws simply by taking up the position of critic.
The editorial team would like to thank the following reviewers who have made important contributi... more The editorial team would like to thank the following reviewers who have made important contributions to JCT since the summer of 2008. Many of these reviewer Thank you for your outstanding work!
Philosophy of Education Archive, 2016
Kevin Gary’s use of Louis C.K.’s anxiety concerning technology, overcome with the transience of a... more Kevin Gary’s use of Louis C.K.’s anxiety concerning technology, overcome with the transience of aesthetic objects and all too aware of the emptiness that lies beneath, remarkably reflects and provides contemporary context for Soren Kierkegaard’s account of despair. Nonetheless, C.K.’s response to the emptiness of aesthetic pursuits demonstrates a failure of ethical life by Kierkegaard’s exacting standards. C.K.’s humor, as a partial solution to his anxiety, falls under the lowest category of Kierkegaardian ethics, namely, irony, or continuing to live in the world and accept its demands while refusing to be implicated by it, claiming exception to human flaws simply by taking up the position of critic. C.K. indicates a problem of modern life rather than resolving it, leaving us with the harder question: how might suffering be seen as an educational phenomenon? While the search for extradiscursive elements in educational scholarship has led to more interest in issues such as suffering,...
The folks at Routledge have been kind enough to provide a copy of the front material and first ch... more The folks at Routledge have been kind enough to provide a copy of the front material and first chapter of the book, which we have attached here. The first chapter provides a rationale for the book and introduces some of the principal concepts, as well as an extended overview of the chapters. Happy Reading! Also attached is a flyer with links to use if you want to request the book at your library and a 20% discount if you would like to buy the book yourself. Please contact us if you would like a copy for a review and we'll put you in touch with the publishers.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2016
Background/Context This essay takes up McClintock's (2004) critique of educational discourses... more Background/Context This essay takes up McClintock's (2004) critique of educational discourses as overly dependent upon a distributive model of justice and largely ignorant of the formative assumptions that ground educational policy and practice. Purpose/Objective The question that McClintock's analysis begs is how educational scholarship became attached to a theoretical model that seems to fail its own requirements. My aim is to identify some of the sources of our assumptions about educational justice in order to tether them to their origins and understand how these ideological influences continue to shape our contemporary purposes Research Design I analyze a selection of significant moments in the history of educational thought in terms of their respective contributions to one of two ideals of justice: the distributive and the formative. My aim is to show how these two long-standing ideals influence contemporary thought on educational justice and to question whether our adh...
The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2016
Abstract:In its fidelity to Aristotle’s Poetics, David Hansen’s “A Poetics of Teaching” reveals a... more Abstract:In its fidelity to Aristotle’s Poetics, David Hansen’s “A Poetics of Teaching” reveals a tension between the end of the poet’s work in the poem and the end of the work of poetry in the effect it has on its audience. While Aristotle defines the purpose of poetry in its effect, he equally claims that the poet’s explicit courting of the audience for the sake of effect is the mark of lesser poetry. To understand this tension in its relation to education, I inquire into the psychology and possible pedagogy of poetic influence: first, through Diotima’s speech on poesis and Eros in Plato’s Symposium; second, through poetics and belatedness in Hannah Arendt and Harold Bloom; and, finally, through Socrates’s pedagogical poetry in the Phaedo.
Educational Theory, 2015
From Socrates to Jean Brodie, we have become accustomed to teachers serving as placeholders for t... more From Socrates to Jean Brodie, we have become accustomed to teachers serving as placeholders for transgressive and powerful desires in our cultural imaginary. Evidenced by recent scholarship on teachers in film, however, as well as by the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal, the way we ought to feel about teachers acting on their transgressive motivations, realizing the cultural fantasies that shadow desire and break from social norms, is less clear. In this article James Stillwaggon and David Jelinek frame the problematic erotics of school films in terms of the fantasy of the subject presumed to know and the transgressive bliss of jouissance. Stillwaggon and Jelinek analyze Notes on a Scandal as a breakdown and reversal of the tradition of school films to which it is indebted and work from it toward an understanding of the unrecognized and often conflicted cultural commitments that shape teaching.
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2013
As Modernist doctrines emphasizing the unity and agency of the educated self are increasingly set... more As Modernist doctrines emphasizing the unity and agency of the educated self are increasingly set up as the straw men of contemporary educational discourses, premodern and Medieval theories of selfhood tend to disappear from the horizon of educational thought altogether. In this essay, in order to subvert this overcoming of our intellectual past, I examine Thomas Aquinas’ reading of the doctrine of original sin. Relying on Graham McAleer’s claim that Aquinas’ metaphysical theory sanctifies the body, I argue that Aquinas’ understanding of original sin relies on a discursive, pedagogical model to account for human finitude.
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2008
Teacher identity is defined in its relations, on the one hand, to curriculum and, on the other, t... more Teacher identity is defined in its relations, on the one hand, to curriculum and, on the other, to students: to be identified as a teacher is to be taken by the latter as a bearer of the former. In this essay I consider some variations on theorising teacher identity within these relational ...
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2011
This paper deals with some issues underlying the role of education in the preparation of students... more This paper deals with some issues underlying the role of education in the preparation of students for democratic participation.Throughout, I maintain two basic ideas: first, that a political action undertaken to obtain practical ends reflects a set of privately held values whose ...
Education and Culture, 2016
Philosophy of Education Archive, 2007
David Diener has given a close reading of the exchange at the end of the Republic, Book V, follow... more David Diener has given a close reading of the exchange at the end of the Republic, Book V, following the course of a debate surrounding its interpretation and weeding out a less likely alternative reading by looking at the logical inconsistencies that result. Diener’s critique of Gail Fine’s alternative reading points to a great difference, and suggests a “drastic effect” in the way each interpretation might inform educational theory. Yet when Diener moves to the scene of instruction in the cave allegory, he expresses the differing effects in these two statements: Following the traditional reading, “the freed prisoner is able to reenter the cave and correctly appraise as mere shadows the images on the wall.” On the alternative reading, the educated person “is now able to distinguish between what appears to be true and what really is so.” The similarity of these two educational outcomes might lead us to believe that Diener has misled us in claiming that drastic differences for educat...
Philosophy of Education Archive, 2011
Amy Shuffelton’s essay provides convincing responses to some common fears regarding teacher–stude... more Amy Shuffelton’s essay provides convincing responses to some common fears regarding teacher–student friendships, including inequality, partiality, and motivation. In refuting these arguments and outlining some positive potentials in pedagogical friendships, she also references another characteristic of character friendships, namely a mutuality of knowledge and recognition between friends, which remains unexamined in relation to pedagogical relationships, and may benefit from consideration. By contrasting our expectations of mutual knowledge in friendship and in pedagogical relationships, I suggest that the student’s lack of knowledge about the teacher plays an important role in learning, and may also shape what is possible in teacher–student friendships.
Philosophy of Education Archive, 2005
It will probably surprise no one that many of the theorists writing on the role of love in educat... more It will probably surprise no one that many of the theorists writing on the role of love in education today locate the power of love in its “transgressive” or “disruptive” character — that is, in the negative role it may play against or within the bureaucratic, inhuman structures of schools. The rhetorical force generated by arguments based in the negative character of love in education may be related to our inability to positively define what the personal relationships between teachers and students ought to be or to allow, but it would be a mistake to think that theorists of love in education are limited to this sense of indefiniteness. As this essay seeks to set out, love in education is mostly theorized under two categories of negativity that provide a normative conclusion against the limits placed upon both teachers’ and students’ humanity by current policies and practices. In the following pages, I examine these categories, which I refer to as “absence” and “transgressivity,” by...
... Gary Allan Scott and William A. Welton, Erotic Wisdom: Philosophy and Intermediacy in Plato&a... more ... Gary Allan Scott and William A. Welton, Erotic Wisdom: Philosophy and Intermediacy in Plato's Symposium Reviewed by. James Stillwaggon. Philosophy in Review ISSN (online) 1920-8936 © University of Victoria. This journal ...
Childhood beyond Pathology offers an account of the ways that psychoanalytic concepts can inform ... more Childhood beyond Pathology offers an account of the ways that psychoanalytic concepts can inform ongoing challenges of representing development, belonging, and relationality, with a focus on debates over how children should be treated, what they might know, and who they should become. Drawing from fiction, clinical studies, and courtroom and classroom contexts, Lisa Farley explores a series of five conceptual figures—the replacement child, the neurodiverse child, the counterfeit child, the child heir of historical trauma, and the gender divergent child—with a keen eye to discussions of social justice and human dignity. The book reveals the emotional situations, social tensions, and political issues that shape the meaning of childhood, and focuses on what happens when a child departs from normative scripts of development. Through thought-provoking analysis, Farley develops themes that include childhood loss, the myth of innocence, the problem of diagnosis, the subject of racial hatre...
Philosophy of Education Archive, 2010
Desire is often hailed as a liberating or equalizing force in educational practices; some conside... more Desire is often hailed as a liberating or equalizing force in educational practices; some consider its very presence to be endowed with the power to interrupt oppressive educational practices as well as the social norms that undergird these practices. Cris Mayo reflects this attitude about desire’s potential within dominant educational discourses in her 2007 essay, “Disruptions of Desire: From Androgynes to Genderqueer,” describing desire as “the bridge between what is and what might be, disrupting stale patterns and creating new formations.”
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Papers by James Stillwaggon
Also attached is a flyer with links to use if you want to request the book at your library and a 20% discount if you would like to buy the book yourself. Please contact us if you would like a copy for a review and we'll put you in touch with the publishers.