Learning to Stop: Mindfulness Meditation as Anti-violence Pedagogy

ISBN-13: 9783031287213 / Angielski

Remy Y. S. Low

Opis

This book is a philosophical and historical study that explores how meditative practices for cultivating mindfulness can be regarded as a unique form of education against violence—one that emphasizes stopping and contemplation as a necessary precursor to action. It brings together the idiosyncratic but insightful musings on violence by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek with recent research on mindfulness and violence as a lens. Using this lens, it looks at two exemplary educators and how they taught mindfulness meditation as a way of resisting the types of violence they and their students faced: the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh amidst the brutality of the Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and the African-American studies professor and cultural critic bell hooks in the face of systemic oppression in the United States of the 1980s.

Spis treści

Chapter 1. ‘Just sit and wait’: Žižek’s kōan

Chapter 2. ‘I would prefer not to’: Violence, Subtraction, and Contemplative Pedagogy

Chapter 3. ‘Don't just do something, sit there’: Thich Nhat Hanh and the School of Youth for Social Service

Chapter 4. ‘There is no change without contemplation’: bell hooks and the Sisters of the Yam

Chapter 5. ‘I will not run’: Mindfulness in contexts of violence

O autorze

Remy Y.S. Low is Senior Lecturer in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is also the author of The Mind and Teachers in the Classroom: Exploring Definitions of Mindfulness (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). 

Blurb

This book is a philosophical and historical study that explores how meditative practices for cultivating mindfulness can be regarded as a unique form of education against violence—one that emphasizes stopping and contemplation as a necessary precursor to action. It brings together the idiosyncratic but insightful musings on violence by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek with recent research on mindfulness and violence as a lens. Using this lens, it looks at two exemplary educators and how they taught mindfulness meditation as a way of resisting the types of violence they and their students faced: the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh amidst the brutality of the Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and the African-American studies professor and cultural critic bell hooks in the face of systemic oppression in the United States of the 1980s.

Remy Y.S. Low is Senior Lecturer in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is also the author of The Mind and Teachers in the Classroom: Exploring Definitions of Mindfulness (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).