Claudia Eppert

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Secondary Education

Radical personal and systemic social transformation is urgently needed to address world-wide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid, unprecedented global destruction of our environment. Recent years have seen an embrace of intersubjectivity within discourse on educational transformation within academia and...

Given ecological atrocities and widespread ill mental health among humans, this article contemplates possibilities for educations of ecological well-becoming. It introduces contemplative, emotion-aware, and cosmospolitan embraces as part of such educations. Additionally, with reference to psychoanalysis, Buddhist thought, and Indigenous, specifical...

At a critical point in Joy Kogawa's narrative Obasan (1981), a novel dealing with the difficult remembrance of the internment and forced dispersal of Japanese-Canadians during and following World War II, the central character, Naomi Nakane, dreams of her dead mother. She has just come to learn that her mother had experienced the nuclear bombing of...

This chapter examines ethical obligations of bearing witness to ecological devastation and nonhuman worlds in the Anthropocene. A meditation on rocks and reflection on a Holocaust memorial leads to a brief review of the ethical turn in scholarship on historical witnessing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. From there, with reference to the writings...

Not all sandstone statues of the goddess Cura were in the last museum. A number remained, secretly peppered throughout the ruins of the mountainous metropolis and the lands once called After. They looked similar to the ancient, preserved one of Cura sitting in a meditative posture on a throne holding a basket of fruit. However, unlike the preserved...

As a child, I loved my forest walks. These days it is difficult to connect this long-time joy with the knowledge of widespread deforestation and destruction of wildlife habitats, knowledge that induces grief and despair. This chapter illustrates how environmental destruction shifts common understandings of grief. It also contends that struggles for...

This essay explores Maggie Berg's and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor with reference to David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, in which he examines lack and its history in philosophy, theology, and Western institutions from medieval times to the present day.

In this paper, we propose an understanding of philosophy of education as cultural and intercultural work and philosophers of education as cultural and intercultural workers. In our view, the discipline of philosophy of education in North America is currently suffering from measures of insularity and singularity. It is vital that we justly and respe...

What does it mean to live in global times of terror? What are our responsibilities to children in such times? This paper draws attention to how war and terror are internal states that express themselves externally. With reference to Asian wisdom traditions, and specifically the Bhagavad Gita, it suggests that spiritual insight into our fundamental...

This paper addresses the primacy of reason over emotion in much of Western philosophy and education. It brings Theravadan Buddhist wisdom to bear upon Western philosophical and educational conceptions of emotion, empathy, and compassion. More specifically, it discusses the four Brahmavihāras, or Divine Abodes. These abodes are considered boundless...

In contemporary times, we continue to witness dire environmental neglect, exploitation, and destruction, generally recognized as the legacy of a damaging western phallogocentrism. Within the last decade, the language of witnessing is increasingly deployed to describe processes of working through the origins, dimensions, dynamics, and consequences o...

Geoffrey Hartman notes “there is no lack of serious attention to the Shoah; after a slow start, after a stunned reaction, historians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and artists have entered what has been characterized as a period of obsession” (1996, 1). What is not at issue—at least in the midterm—is whether or not the Shoah will be forgotten. Howe...

Educators often assume that meaningful encounters with traumatic historical events can be brought about through hearing, reading, or viewing accounts that make apparent personal engagements with history. These accounts variously take the form of diaries or eyewitness statements, documentary photographs or film, novels, poetry, stories, song, fictio...

My thanks to Geoffrey Clayton for his research, and to Deanne Bogdan, Charlene Morton, and Candace Yang for their comments and editorial suggestions. 1. Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City," in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randell (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986), 91-2. 2. Ibid., 92-94. 3....

It is often assumed that history becomes meaningful when seen through the lens of personal experience. We examine the ethical obligations in witnessing testimony that conveys aspects of a traumatic "lived past." We discuss two different modes of attending to testimony and illustrate the tensions between them in reference to testimony about the Nazi...