RE: pedagogy – after neutrality

Abstract

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an approach which has become ‘black boxed’ on account of the work that it achieves. A series of new orientations within the academy that are broadly associated with post‐structuralist philosophies, feminist and post‐colonial studies, together with insights into science and technology studies, question the plausibility of these claims for neutrality whilst in turn raising a series of new questions and priorities. It therefore becomes necessary to rethink and reframe what it is to make sense of religious and cultural difference after neutrality. The gathering and coordination of new planes of sense‐making that are responsive to an emergent series of epistemological, ontological and ethical orientations are considered. Some of the distinctive pedagogical implications of such an approach that engages material practice, difference and uncertainty are then entertained.

Keywords:

• neutrality
• sense‐making
• ontological politics
• eventfulness
• pedagogy of difference

Notes

1. Episteme is Foucault’s (2002) concept for describing the set of relationships that govern what can be said at a given time.

2. The concept of black box is a form of complexity reduction which enables one to overlook how a given process operates: the set of operations is bracketed so that only its effects are taken into account.

3. It is now widely recognised that sensory orientations differ markedly between cultures and may foreground senses which supplement the traditional five senses in the West (e.g. Geurts 2003).

4. Within a school context, spaces are also differentiated with that the classroom and playground have very different affordances. Cf. Allan et al. (2005) for such a reading in relation to issues of inclusion.