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Listening to stories of suffering can be difficult, painful, and even traumatic.
Yet listen we do and listen we must. If we do not hear or bear witness to these stories,
then we are rendered incapable of responding, of answering for our or other’s
actions, of taking a position of responsibility. Thus listening is central to the ways
in which educational projects of social justice are conceived. Within these projects
there is a legitimate focus on listening to the voices of the marginalized and the
wounded, and on giving space and time to those groups to articulate their own
experiences, struggles, dilemmas, and needs. In the context of teaching and learning
encounters, students are often exposed to narratives that offer them radically
different experiences from their own and when these experiences are marked by
suffering, their responses can cut across a range of emotional registers: solidarity,
pity, empathy, desire, identification, and guilt, to name a few. Such responses reveal
s...
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