David Hansen

ABSTRACT In this unique volume, Wiel Veugelers provides a critical overview of research he has undertaken in the field of moral and citizenship education over the past twenty-five years. The watchword is ‘critical’. Veugelers has not simply thrown together a set of previously published works. Rather, he applies a three-part critical lens to each entry, which can be summarized as follows: (1) why he composed the article in the first place, (2) how the article was received in the field, and (3) how the author feels about the article now, especially with respect to its contemporary relevance. This critical perspective helps bring alive the fourteen selected publications, which are divided into six parts whose sequence nicely frames Veugelers’ career research trajectory. In this review, I will touch on each of the six parts and then conclude with several questions his important research program has bequeathed to the field of moral and citizenship education.

In this article, David Hansen works with two conceptions of “being with.” The first is Jean-Luc Nancy's ontological version as found in his Being Singular Plural (1999). The second is Hansen's ontic formulation as expressed in his recent book, Reimagining the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching (2021). Nancy's notion is ethical as well as ontological. It constitutes a vision of human being qua being and is formulated in critical juxtaposition with the viewpoints on ethics and being of Martin Heidegger and other recent thinkers. Hansen's conception is not ontological, as such, but is ethical in the sense of presuming that teaching is a practice with built-in terms of relationship between teachers, students, and the subject matter of education, where “education” differs from socialization and enculturation. “Being with” constitutes a term of art for the priority in teaching of attunement, responsiveness, and receptivity — both to students and to subject matter — over formal processes of teacher reflection. The latter are indispensable, but they take their identity and their warrant from the fundamental ethical terms of the practice that are rooted in being with. Here, Hansen seeks to show how Nancy's conception of being with enriches the pedagogical idea of being with as the center and circumference of teaching.

Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed concept. On the one hand, it concerns the accuracy and validity of practical affairs, for example in a court of law, at a wedding, or in a law office. On the other hand, the term can embody powerful religious, social, and/ or moral meaning, whether in bearing witness to historical trauma and human suffering, or in paying heed to everyday, seemingly ordinary aspects of nature and of human life. In this article, we address the question of what renders a witness trustworthy. We characterize ethical and epistemic constituents of witnessing. We examine the work of several exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Saidiya Hartman, Jonathan Lear, Etty Hillesum, and John Berger alongside Jean Mohr. These sources help us think about the education of a person who aspires to bear witness, whether it be to traumatic events or to quotidian life in educational or other settings. We present criteria of trustworthiness that can support reflection on what we take to be the important place of bearing witness in educational inquiry and practice.

In Visions of Statesmanship: A Statesman’s Imagination and Autonomy, David Hansen provides a critical examination of the figure of the statesman as it has been presented in the philosophical reflections of three key thinkers: Plato, Yannis Markrygiannis, and Cornelius Castoriadis. In the course of the analysis, the chapters broadly investigate and assess the complex reception history that obtains among this particular configuration of intellectual history by offering authors, activists and texts linked to critical, political, and social theory in German, French, and Anglo-American contexts. The focus falls on the imagination (variously conceived) and notions of autonomy, and how these ideals potentially confront specific conditions of political and social reality. What emerges across the millennia, is an episodic account of dialectical encounters between freedom and unfreedom, how philosophical endeavors discern alternatives that raise consciousness of societal possibilities that challenge realities with the aim of changing practices of domination, oppression, and exploitation. Rather than regard intellectual and literary labor as ideological reflections of the material base, Hansen considers to what extent these free works of the imagination offer concrete visions that would increase justice, communal harmony, and global peace historical contingencies and limitations.