Estimating equilibrium real interest rates in real-time

We use a range of simple models and 22 years of real-time data vintages for the U.S. to assess the difficulties of estimating the equilibrium real interest rate in real time. Model specifications differ according to whether the time-varying equilibrium real rate is linked to trend growth, and whether potential output and growth are defined by the CBO?s estimates or treated as unobserved variables. Our results reveal a high degree of specification uncertainty, an important one-sided filtering problem, and considerable imprecision due to data uncertainty. Also, the link between trend growth and the equilibrium real rate is shown to be quite weak. Overall, we conclude that statistical estimates of the equilibrium real rate will be difficult to use reliably in practical policy applications. --real-time-data,time-varying parameter,Kalman filter,trend growth

Teaching With Ignorance: Questions of Social Justice, Empathy, and Responsible Community

This paper explores the limitations of empathy for the formation of community, particularly within social justice education. I begin with a discussion of the major tension within the idea of community - that it is founded at once on commonality and difference. Building in particular upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the paper articulates an understanding of community as a signifying encounter with difference that is not founded upon knowledge about the other, but upon a being-for and feeling-for the other. Focusing upon the explicitly educational commitment to working out forms of relationality conducive to establishing community and social justice across social differences, I ask how might teaching with ignorance, as opposed to teaching for empathy, bring us closer to the being-for others that marks our ethical engagement with other people and engenders our responsibility to the collective

Shifting education’s philosophical imaginaries: relations, affects, bodies, materialities

As Michèle Le Doeuff pointed out in her classic feminist work, The Philosophical Imaginary, images function in philosophical writing to enact certain political and theoretical possibilities and limitations. She draws our attention to the relationship between images and concepts throughout the history of philosophy, and philosophy’s forgetting and occlusion of its own imaginaries. We wonder with Le Doeuff about the image that philosophy gives to itself of what it is to do philosophy. So too we wonder about the images that orient and inflect both educational practice and research. What images do educational researchers give to themselves of education, the practice of education and of research in education? This issue examines the ways in which diverse educational imaginaries operate. It thinks from and with recent feminist work in both philosophy and education

Between Body and Spirit: The Liminality of Pedagogical Relationships

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy’s notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray’s work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular

What’s the Use of a Teacher?

Most of us have experienced at some time that dreadful feeling of being used. No more than a pawn in another’s strategic game, we feel manipulated, taken advantage of, and somehow betrayed. It is as if in being used we are no longer subjects, but objects of someone else’s will and intent. When others use us as means to their ends, we feel there is no shared moral ground, no intersubjective possibility; it is as if our very sense of who we are vanishes into the instrumentality by which the other defines us. Paradigmatic of immorality, then, why is using others at all useful to education

What’s the Use of a Teacher?

Most of us have experienced at some time that dreadful feeling of being used. No more than a pawn in another’s strategic game, we feel manipulated, taken advantage of, and somehow betrayed. It is as if in being used we are no longer subjects, but objects of someone else’s will and intent. When others use us as means to their ends, we feel there is no shared moral ground, no intersubjective possibility; it is as if our very sense of who we are vanishes into the instrumentality by which the other defines us. Paradigmatic of immorality, then, why is using others at all useful to education

Introduction: Levinas and Education: The Question of Implication

Reading the texts of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) often means entering a strange and lyrical world, a world rife with poetic invocation and profound sensitivity to the suffering of humanity, a world where the philosophical cardinal points of ethics and ontology are repositioned in laying out the terms of responsible subjectivity. Such a world, in its poignant lyricism and philosophical reorientation, has brought us a language of ethics that is deeply resonant with the experience of human relationality

Teaching With Ignorance: Questions of Social Justice, Empathy, and Responsible Community

This paper explores the limitations of empathy for the formation of community, particularly within social justice education. I begin with a discussion of the major tension within the idea of community - that it is founded at once on commonality and difference. Building in particular upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the paper articulates an understanding of community as a signifying encounter with difference that is not founded upon knowledge about the other, but upon a being-for and feeling-for the other. Focusing upon the explicitly educational commitment to working out forms of relationality conducive to establishing community and social justice across social differences, I ask how might teaching with ignorance, as opposed to teaching for empathy, bring us closer to the being-for others that marks our ethical engagement with other people and engenders our responsibility to the collective

Democracy, Education and Conflict: Rethinking Respect and the Place of the Ethical

One of the cornerstones of a democratic education is a basic notion of respect for others who hold different points of view from ourselves. Yet, within an increasingly divergent public discourse about values, rights and equality, democratic education needs to concern itself with practices that not only encourage respect, but that can negotiate through the very troubled relations that often afflict classrooms and schools. Models of how to promote respect often centre on creating a conflictfree atmosphere through appeals to deliberation, dialogue, conversation, consensus or a combination of these. Indeed, conflict is often perceived as not simply being counterproductive to dialogue and conversation, but as being indicative of communicative breakdown itself. In this way, conflict becomes the symptom of social ills through which recourse to some form of dialogue supposedly acts as the remedy. The idea of conflict has become so antithetical to democratic education that little has been written on the inevitability and importance of some kinds of conflict for legitimizing the possibility of democracy itself

Educating Beyond Cultural Diversity: Redrawing the Boundaries of a Democratic Plurality

In this paper I draw some distinctions between the terms ‘‘cultural diversity’’ and ‘‘plurality’’ and argue that a radical conception of plurality is needed in order both to reimagine the boundaries of democratic education and to address more fully the political aspects of conflict that plurality gives rise to. This paper begins with a brief exploration of the usages of the term diversity in European documents that promote intercultural education as a democratic vehicle for overcoming social conflict between different cultural groups. In contradistinction to these usages, this paper calls for a more robust conception of plurality, one that does not simply denote membership in different cultural groupings but is rooted in the human condition and based on a conception of uniqueness. Following the work of Hannah Arendt and feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, I explore how the appearance of unique beings in specific contexts can be understood as an eminently political act and I contend that such a view leads to a better educational understanding of conflict and contestation. The paper sketches the contours of democratic plurality along this line of thought and discusses how these new boundaries have implications for education’s relation to democracy