John Rawls (1985) famously argued that social justice ought not to concern itself with the metaphysical disputes that separate us as groups and individuals. Identity is supposed to be irrelevant to the deliberations of free and equal citizens. Since the recent turn toward right-wing populism, renewed attention has been devoted to the place of…

In this paper, I explore the possibility of social justice education as pedagogy of "attention" rather than simply pedagogy of "intention." Drawing on Gert Biesta's (2010) concept of "strong" education, I begin by explaining how the language of intention in social justice education relies on a discourse in which…