Dialogue and Difference

This course explores a set of closely related questions at the heart of education and psychology, ethics and politics: How do we form ourselves in dialogue with others? How do these external dialogues relate to our ongoing conversations with ourselves? What are the varieties of difference we encounter? How do human beings construct, defend against, open ourselves to, and learn from difference? How do we know if we are really open to the otherness of the other and not simply casting them in some role we have designed? What is the role of recognition and misrecognition in human flourishing and suffering? What does it mean to respect the differences of those with whom we live in our pluralistic societies? Who gets to set the terms of our social dialogues and who decides who is on the invite list? We will investigate these questions through reading and discussion of primary texts, in-class dialogue experiments, and assignments which require keen observation of dialogical and non-dialogical encounters in intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social space.