Rethinking reconciliation and pedagogy in unsettling times

We are living in unsettling times: times in which economic, political, cultural and environmental factors are aggregating in new ways and giving rise to major shifts in global realities and sensibilities. The prime metonymic figure of these times is the border, that deep-etched perimeter in physical, political and discursive space that has been reactivated as a reassurance against unsettlement. Where one is positioned in relation to the border has been rhetorically posed as a place of unambiguous clarity: with or against, us or them, black or white, good or evil. This border longing has frequently been accompanied by the call for a return: to ‘basics’, to simpler times, to ‘common sense’, to language and values not allegedly burdened by ‘political correctness’ or any of the other prescriptions claimed by some to feather the adamantine kernel of truth or frustrate free expression. Over the last decade, under the influence of conservative neo-liberalism, and the epistemological crises of history and culture wars, the border, whether to regulate tariffs or stem the ‘flows’ of people, goods and ideas once held to characterizeboth the threat and promise of globalization (Appadurai 1996), has come to occupy a dominant place in the political and social imaginary. Nation-states have been beset with anxieties about the nature and permeability of their borders arising from environmental crises, the international trade agreements that national economies depend upon, the alliances and enmities tied up in ideologically sustained conflict, as well as the issues of state surveillance and border security claimed as expedients against an all-pervasive threat of terror. At the same time, nations have been forced to accommodate the social, cultural and religious diversities and sources of difference that lie within their borders.