Abstraction and Dissociation: Trauma-informed Pedagogy as Critical Epistemology

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath revealed more clearly than ever the pernicious
processes of standardization and commodification which have been infecting education
and pedagogy for decades. This raises questions about the production and dissemination
of knowledge on two planes: within schools in the form of teaching (the practical level), and within broader institutions regarding the development and implementation of educational
policy based on prevailing ideologies (the theoretical level).

Sohn-Rethel’s theory of Real-Abstraction offers a promising entry into exploring the
dissociation and abstraction of theory and practice, reflecting the global tendencies of
capitalism. This element of dissociation also appears as a key concept in trauma-informed
pedagogy, in that the reintegration of cognition and emotion, mind and body, form a
central aspect in the reclamation of autonomy and personal integrity, which allows for a
critical analysis of pedagogy as practice.

In the following paper, we ask how the distance between theory and practice in pedagogy
reveals an epistemic shift in relation to manual and intellectual labour and consider how
the aforementioned crisis and failures affect trauma-informed pedagogy, as it is practiced
in children and youth care, which are domains particularly affected. In doing so, we show
how pedagogy is in the pathological grasp of an abstracted "forever-human" self-image,
granting it a false and short-term sense of security, while simultaneously being caught in
intensifying processes of apocalyptic and unsustainable proletarianization. Following Jessie Beier's recent publication , we wonder what pedagogies at the end of the world might
instead look like.