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ABSTRACT
Drawing on both Barthes’ concepts of weariness, laziness, and boredom and Sartre’s bad faith, this article analyzes Palestinian students’ psychological discomfort with online education. As instructors of English, we have drawn not only on our own teaching experiences but have also analyzed the testimonies of our colleagues. We contend that online education, brought about by the pandemic, has had a profound psychological effect on students as evidenced by their lack of participation and their disinterest in this mode of education. Students’ silence or their minimal yes/no responses to their instructors’ questions further highlight their boredom during online instruction where there is no dialogue or immediate interaction between students and instructors, students and students, and students and texts. Moreover, many students have testified that they use Facebook to indulge in virtual reality so as to escape the demands of their teachers. The study contends that the birth of the weary, melancholic academic body is symptomatic of the online mode of education in Palestine.
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Notes on contributors
Bilal Hamamra
Bilal Hamamra has a PhD in Early Modern Drama from the University of Lancaster, UK and works currently as an associate professor of English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine. His research interests are in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare, Women's Writings, Gender Studies, Palestinian Studies and Pedagogy. His articles on language, gender politics, onomastics, philosophy of education, martyrdom and diaspora have appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies, Critical Survey, ANQ, Journal for Cultural Research, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Anglia, Psychodynamic Practice, The Explicator, Comparative Literature: East & West, Middle East Critique, Interventions, Social Identities, International Studies in Sociology of Education, English: Journal of the English Association, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Social Identities, and Changing English, among others.
Ahmad Qabaha
Ahmad Qabaha is an assistant professor in Postcolonial, Comparative and American Studies and the head of the English department at An-Najah National University in Palestine. He is highly interested in teaching and conducting research on literature and art as well as examining the various modes and paradigms of literary, historical, socio-political and cultural displacements in the twenty-first century. He is the author of Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing (Palgrave, 2018), and the co-editor of Post-millennial Palestine: Memory, Writing, Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2021). He has also published several articles and book chapters in highly reputable publication companies and journals.