John I'Anson – författare

This book is concerned with re-imagining Religious Education (RE) as this is practiced in schools, colleges and universities throughout the UK and in a wide variety of international educational contexts.On the basis of a critical analysis of current theory and practice in RE the authors argue that this educational framing is no longer plausible in the light of new theoretical developments within the academy. A new educational approach to RE is outlined that challenges students to think and practice differently. This includes a ‘becoming ethnographer’ approach that can acknowledge socio-material relations and engage the broader literacies necessary for such study.Part One examines how RE has been constructed as a discipline in historical and spatial terms that abstract its study from material concerns. Part Two offers some new starting points: Spinoza, Foucault and feminist theory that differently foreground context and relationality, and 'Islam' read as a discursive, located tradition rather than as 'world view'. Finally, Part Three proposes a new trajectory for research and practice in RE, with the aim of re-engaging schools, colleges and universities in a dialogue that promotes thinking and practice that – as educational - is continually in touch with the need to be critical, open-ended and ethically justifiable.

At a time when education is routinely – and problematically – translated into the discourse of learning and teaching to serve a series of instrumental imperatives, the question of what we mean by education is raised with renewed urgency. This book looks beyond present horizons to imagine education anew. It considers ways of theorising education that acknowledge the complexity of its genealogy, empirical practice, and imbrication within regimes of governance, in the light of education’s orientation to both the already actualised and the new and unprecedented. A specifically educational milieu is characterised by the kinds of existential movements and negotiations to which this gives rise, together with a language and grammar for their articulation, that points to their urgency and significance.A poetics of education – an edupoetics – is thus a considered response to this exigency.Through engaging a variety of felicitous tropes – that include the sea and its navigation (Serres), opacity (Glissant), desire (ʿAṭṭār), precarity (Butler), gift (Manning), and chiasma (Merleau-Ponty), it becomes possible to articulate an educational image of thinking that, in welcoming the new and unforeseen, promotes a radical hospitality to difference.The chapters engage a variety of writers to explore how an edupoetics might intersect with a series of specific educational scenes and concerns that include, for example, the qualities of ‘good’ research that opens to the other-than-human, the complexities of doctoral supervision, the pedagogics of gender, and the gift of neurodiversity. This book articulates an alternative educational imaginary – an edupoetics – that gestures towards collectivities gathered around matters of intense concern. It will be relevant to scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in educational theory and the philosophy of education.