This paper is grounded in a phenomenological-interpretive exploration of how mourning is experienced and understood by the victim's nuclear family--the victims are Greek-Cypriot missing persons whose remains have been recovered, identified and properly buried, after exhumations of mass graves in the aftermath of war. Particularly, the focus is on…

This paper suggests the need for a critical analysis of the nationalization of mourning and its educational implications, especially in conflict-ridden areas. Our thoughts are grounded in a comparative study on mourning that has been conducted as part of our long-standing ethnographic research in schools in Cyprus and Israel during the last 10…

In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas examines how the work of mourning can evoke public and school pedagogies that provide an alternative way of relating to otherness and trauma--not through remaining fixated on simply representing the other's or one's own trauma, but in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before suffering. A major concern is…

In this article I examine the possibilities that exist within mourning and mourning narratives for coming to terms with the pain and suffering of the oppositional Other. This implies that rather than taking official discourses as structured and predictable, research with citizens of Cyprus, who had lost loved ones through war, demonstrates…

In this essay, the author attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Despite some literature addressing the consequences of nostalgia in the context of teaching, little has been done towards…

This article presents an in-depth analysis of two commemoration events in a first-grade classroom of a bilingual school in Israel. The two events presented--the commemorations of the Holocaust Day and the Memorial Day--derive from a longitudinal ethnographic study of integrated bilingual schools in Israel. The analysis of these events shows…

In troubled societies narratives about the past tend to be partial and explain a conflict from narrow perspectives that justify the national self and condemn, exclude and devalue the 'enemy' and their narrative. Through a detailed analysis, Teaching Contested Narratives reveals the works of identity, historical narratives and memory as these are…

How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze's "Disgrace," and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering…