Page 107 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

addresses several of the pedagogical processes that contribute to assimilative or liberal

framings of “difficult knowledge.” He writes: “Those might include a desire to protect the
learner by avoiding knowledge that is likely to disturb his/her held worldviews or by

framing the learning in ways that minimize the horror of the events described, preferring

instead to produce what Linenthal (1995) termed a comfortable horrible. This is
sometimes done by avoiding particular elements of the difficult knowledge to be

encountered, by ‘hiding’ it in less accessible spaces, or by framing it in ways that help

learners see the difficult knowledge at hand as part of a larger, more comforting, story”
(2014, 57).

3. I had never thought to consider how a focus on climatically sensitive life forms might
"disappear" other, less indicative species and earth systems.

4. I struggle with how to relate to the sentience of other creatures in terms other than
human. How do we depict life that cannot speak to us? Narrative feels like an imposition,

dangerously narcissistic and self-serving. Yet the problem of how to encounter nature,

the other, the 'vibrant' (often unseen or glossed-over) matter of the world feels pressing;
the stakes of not trying feel too high. How to relate to the sentience of other creatures in

terms other than human? What are the stakes involved in such a project? What

aesthetic/methodological rendering can support it?

5. Roger Simon writes, “As Judith Butler emphasized, for a death to be grievable what

must become apparent is that there was a life there and that this life mattered. When the
apprehension of death becomes a spectacle, one may be horrified, but the possibility of

thinking through one’s relation to this image as the death of another is sharply

attenuated” (31).