On Academic Dissonance: Teaching Indignation or Teaching with Indignation? Reflections Inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation

The article questions how pedagogy, the core of higher education institutions, is understood and operated within the academic world. By building on Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of Indignation, Estella Carpi discusses the behavioural dissonance between what academics write and teach (and, thus, to some extent, who they say they are) and how they actually behave in everyday life. In a system where patrons are still servants and servants will become patrons, a "radical" pedagogy is possible only if people actively work towards it consistently, rather than blaming an immobile, abstract system of power and control

Syrian Refugee Faith Leaders in Lebanon: Navigating the Intersection Between Assistance Provision and “Spiritual Activism”

With the “localization of aid” principle being re-asserted during the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, humanitarian work has been emerging as a complex set of hybrid moral assemblages and genealogies, rather than a “Western afflatus.” While hegemonic humanitarian actors are primarily involving local faith leaders in countries receiving refugees, the involvement of refugee faith leaders in relief assistance has remained overshadowed. This chapter is based on the author’s fieldwork with Syrian refugee faith leaders in Lebanon between 2018 and 2019, some of whom subsequently relocated to Turkey and Sweden. Such faith leaders locate themselves at the intersection between donors and implementers of aid, often providing services themselves. The chapter shows how they view transregional forms of aid not only as an effective way of restoring their own socio-spiritual role outside of Syria and of gatekeeping moral and religious knowledge in displaced communities, but also as an instrument of peacebuilding and social justice among the Syrian displaced worldwide. The author specifically interprets their aid work through the sociology of aiding inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s “spiritual activism” (2015), which combines practices of spirituality with political activism

La resistenza culturale nel Libano contemporaneo. Le sfide di artiste locali e profughe

Sulla base di interviste condotte nel 2018, questo articolo analizza le somiglianze e le differenze che intercorrono tra le sfide che i “fautori della cultura” – artiste in primis – cittadine libanesi e rifugiate palestinesi e siriane devono affrontare nel contesto libanese. Dopo un’illustrazione dello scenario storico-politico libanese e di come in esso la “resistenza culturale” emerge in modo poliedrico, gli autori individuano aree d’incontro e di potenziale solidarietà tra gruppi. L’articolo discute la cosiddetta “umanitarizzazione” dei finanziamenti, attraverso la quale vengono sostenuti e potenziati soprattutto i progetti artistici che possono fungere da strumento di neutralità politica e di “medicalizzazione” dei traumi post-guerra. Tale fenomeno genera in parte una depoliticizzazione ed esteticizzazione dell’arte, “demobilitando” quindi la verve politica dietro al lavoro culturale e, allo stesso tempo, lega la sopravvivenza materiale di tali spazi culturali a cicliche crisi umanitarie.Based on interviews conducted during 2018, this article examines the challenges that Lebanese citizen, Palestinian and Syrian refugee “culture-makers” – primarily artists – need to face in the Lebanese context, and how such challenges differ from or overlap with one another. After providing an overview of Lebanese political history and how, within it, "cultural resistance" emerges in a multifaceted way, the authors identify areas of encounter and of potential solidarity between groups. The article discusses the so-called "humanitarianization" of funding, through which especially the artistic projects that can serve as instruments of political neutrality and of "medicalization" of post-war traumas are supported. This phenomenon generates in part a de-politicization and aestheticization of art, thus demobilizing the political verve behind cultural work and, at the same time, linking the material survival of such cultural spaces to cyclical humanitarian crises