The touch of the present

This presentation explores educational encounter as a space and time of becoming that is deeply bound up with sensory experiences of the world. In particular, Sharon Todd, professor in the Maynooth University Faculty of Social Sciences, will discuss how to think of encounters as a form of ’touching’ and ’being touched by’ that lack any sharp borders between what is ’inside’ the subject and what is ’outside’ in the world.

This liminal space has been identified variously as ’enaction,’ ’co-emergence’ and ’co-creation’ in various theoretical traditions. Todd will relate these conceptions of encounter to an idea of education that exists beyond both dominant understandings of education as socialization and critical understandings of education as liberation.

Todd will discuss how encounters are times and spaces through which one can not only become ‘socialized’ into a given order or potentially become interruptive of that order, but also how they can offer an undecidable dimension to educational practices that inherently has both political and aesthetic implications for becoming.

Drawing on philosophical, aesthetic and Buddhist resources, Todd reframes ’becoming through encounter’ as an educational-sensual process of ’awakening’ that touches on all three of these dimensions.