Love as ethico-political practice: Inventing reparative pedagogies of aimance in “disjointed” times

Abstract

This article draws on the conceptualization of love as ethico-political practice and a nonidentitarian strategy for political communities to present possibilities for thinking pedagogically about what the late Moroccan writer and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi called ’aimance‘. Khatibis's constructed term for affinity, affection, tolerance and friendship is a powerful concept for invoking love as a force for social change. The article builds on theorization of love as a transformative political concept in critical education to highlight further that aimance offers important new pedagogical openings along two directions: first, the ethical and political concept of aimance allows educators and students to conceptualize and practice a form of ‘de-colonial love’ that recognizes humanity and affinity across difference; second, an ethico-political practice of love as aimance encourages educators to invent pedagogies that are ‘reparative’, that is, pedagogies which attempt to address wound, injury and suffering within a frame that takes into consideration histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality. This article asks, then, how a consideration of aimance might enable critical pedagogues rethink the very contours of love as an ethico-political practice in education.

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