Niclas Månsson

The Limits of Socialisation.

The article deals with the question of living with others, one of the most significant relationships of human life, and challenge the common understanding of the origins of living with others, where a human being is not just becoming a social but also a moral being through social institutions of societies. This common understanding of a social relationship, fostered and nurtured by a given society, places the responsibility for the possibility of living with others on the other. Drawing on the work from the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and George Simmel and the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Løgstrup we argue that the possibility of living with others is based on the rights of the other rather than of the rights to determine whom the other is.By focusing on the relation between the individual and the society on the one hand, and the connections between being moral and being social on the other hand, we suggest that the process of socialisation is devastating not only for human beings individuality and his or her moral capacity but also for a responsive educational praxis. We explore the ways in which an understanding of socialisation as the making of the social being is intimately linked to how institutional education ‘thinks itself.’ This exploration is followed by a critical discussion of the limits of socialisation, and therefore also the limits of education. By considering some of the problems about the making of the social being we arrive at the conclusion that there is the possibility for education to be somewhere else rather than within socialisation. This conclusion leads us to explore the possibilities for an educational praxis that embraces the other without holding the individuals otherness against them.

Facing ambivalence in education: a strange(r's) hope?

This article explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if we saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. Following Baumans sociology of the stranger and Derridas deconstructions of hospitality, the article unfolds in three parts. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. In the second part we consider the intolerance of strangers the modern will-to-order has caused. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. In the third part we ask how educational spaces hospitable to strangers can be opened up, and argue that we would do better not to construe living with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice.

Refugees, Statelessness, and Education

Transnational migration is not a novelty; it has been a constant element of human existence. In recent years, the question of migration has preoccupied public discourse in many countries, especially when it comes to refugees and asylum-seekers. This situation has also influenced the discourse on educational praxis and educational research, and posed the question of how educators should respond to the refugee crisis. When it comes to the educational traditions I explore in this chapter (multicultural education, citizenship education, and cosmopolitan education), and their relation to the question of refugees, they have focused more on migrants and the process of admission, inclusion, and citizenship, rather than on the existential state of the refugee. Even if these traditions have their differences, they share the devotion to citizenship, community, and humanity, and that a proper educational response to the refugee crisis is to be found in the universal declaration of human rights. However, when it comes to the empirical situation worldwide, this focus seems too narrow since it only includes de jure refugees and misses those who remain outside the political community. These refugees do not share the world with the rest of humankind. With the help of the works of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben on refugees and human rights, I show that the existential dimension of the refugee is fundamental for keeping the educational question on the past and the present, the local and the global, and inhabitants and migrants, alive.