This paper puts in conversation Martin Heidegger's concept of "Stimmung" (mood or attunement) with Raymond Williams' notion of 'structures of feeling' to theorize 'mood work' in peace education. It is argued that the perspective of mood provides new insights in peace education that might be harder to grasp through the lens of affect or…

This paper draws on ethnographic data from a project on peace education and reconciliation pedagogies in the conflict-affected context of Cyprus. Following a primary school teacher over the period of eight months in peace education workshops and in her classroom before and after the workshops, we trace critical moments that seem to have an impact…

The paper explores how might teacher educators engage with teachers' difficult knowledge and negotiate competing moral truths, when this effort obviously fails to provide adequate 'answers' or 'solutions'. Although the paper is theoretical, this question's point of departure is an incident from a series of teacher workshops in Cyprus. The question…

This paper focuses on the limitations of the Eurocentric modernist framework that undergirds Freirean theory and critical pedagogy in relation to critical peace education, highlighting in particular the contributions of post-colonial and decolonial thinking. The paper posits that critical approaches to peace education need to consider these…

This paper explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets religious education and its contribution to peace. In particular, this phenomenological exploratory study: first, examines how teachers perceive religious education and whether this conceptualization is considered to be (in)compatible with peace in the…

This paper investigates the interference of local politics with a peace education initiative in Greek-Cypriot education and the consequent impact on teachers' perceptions and responses. Focusing on a recent educational attempt to promote "peaceful coexistence", the authors explain how this attempt was seen by many teachers as being a…

This paper explores the intersection of critical pedagogy and nonviolence in a case study of a white novice teacher at an urban school in the Midwestern United States. Drawing on various theoretical streams that contribute to this possible marriage of critical pedagogy, non-violence and critical peace education, the authors formulate the notion of…

In this paper we examine Greek-Cypriot teachers' positions towards the--largely unfamiliar--concept of reconciliation within the Greek-Cypriot community. Looking at a set of 40 interviews conducted in spring 2009, this study is set against the broader historical context of the continuing Cyprus Problem and the development of ethnic rivalry between…

In this article, we present vignettes from two projects--one in Cyprus and the other in South Africa--to show how some classrooms enact "heterotopic" affective spaces that oppose normal/ized identities, that is, identities grounded in polarized trauma narratives. The notion of heterotopia is a spatial concept developed by Foucault to…

In this article I examine ways in which educators can use discourses of empathy and reconciliation to problematise the prevailing conflictive ethos in their curriculum and pedagogy. The ideals of empathy and reconciliation are examined through the lens of "emotion"; the emotional effects of trauma narratives raise a question that has been largely…