towards an ethics of ibl
DESCRIPTION
In this symposium we will first describe our collaboration across disciplines to facilitate a first-year IBL course for social work students, which required them to engage with and research the lives of a diverse range of service-users and carers, then to present their findings using a variety of media and formats including video and performance. Using insights gained from this experience and others, and from a diverse range of cultural theory, we will propose a theoretical framework in which to understand a broad ‘ethics’ of IBL. We will suggest some links between the practises of inquiry-based learning and an ethical mode of being in the world.TRANSCRIPT
TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF IBL
Yasmin Farooq & Brendan Stone, University of Sheffield
MULTIPLE
identities
“What are the main issues for service users when representing their needs to social workers?”
groups COLLABORATIONresearch
inquirysocialscience
thearts
COMMUNICATIONBLOGS
video
poetryculturaltheory
diversity
community
performance
REFLECTION
CRITICAL
discussion
INDEPENDENCE
OPENING SEMINAR
Research and people
“To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference."
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p.128
Research and people
Listen...
To your ‘sources’
And...
To yourself
Research and people
Listen...
To your ‘sources’
And...
To yourself
HOW are you listening?
WHAT are your assumptions?
Do they get in the way of hearing?
SURGERY
INDEPENDENT RESEARCH
PRESENTATIONS
TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF IBL
“To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference."
• Sigmund Freud• Martin Heidegger• Julia Kristeva, • Judith Butler, • Sarah Kofman, • Maurice Blanchot• Galen Strawson• Christopher Bollas• Emmanuel Lévinas
TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF IBL
“A calling into question of the Same - which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same - is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge.”
EMMANUEL LÉVINAS
From: Lévinas, Totality and Infinity
“It is only because the self is assigned to the other before it acts on its own that it can be itself, that is, singular. Throughout his writing Levinas discovers an unmediated alterity in every identity: the vulnerability, susceptibility and ‘nudity’ of the self is evidence of such alterity. For philosophy to come to terms with evidence of this kind it must abandon idealism as well as empiricism and revise its notions of experience and sensibility. Experience does not consist in subsuming mental representations under general terms but in taking responsibility for the other and exposing oneself to one’s own alterity.”
EMMANUEL LÉVINAS
Peter Fenves, Alterity and identity, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge
• Levinas: “Experience does not consist in subsuming mental representations under general terms but in taking responsibility for the other and exposing oneself to one’s own alterity.”
• Judith Butler: “My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to another ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? Is there in this affirmation of partial transparency a possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language and to you than I previously knew? And is the relationality that conditions and blinds this "self" not, precisely, an indispensable resource for ethics?”
ETHICS AND ALTERITY
The uncanny would thus be the royal way [...] by means of which Freud introduced the fascinated rejection of the other at the heart of that "our self," so poised and dense, which precisely no longer exists ever since Freud and shows itself to be a strange land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed.[...]The foreigner is within us. And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious—that "improper" facet of our impossible "own and proper." Delicately, analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves.
ETHICS AND ALTERITY
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves
With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself, and [...] irrigates our very speaking being, estranged by other logics, including the heterogeneity of biology... Henceforth we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others.[...]
