A Past Of Possibilities

An exploration of hypothetical turning points in history from Ancient Greece to September 11 What if history, as we know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of the future and the past, or uchronias, A Past of Possibilities encourages deeper consideration of watershed moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology, anthropology, and film. In probing the genre of literature and history that is fascinated with hypotheticals surrounding key points in history, Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou reach beyond a mere reimagining of history, exploring the limits and potentials of the futures past. From the most bizarre fiction to serious scientific hypothesis, they provide a survey of the uses of counterfactual histories, methodological issues on the possible in Social Sciences, and practical proposals for using alternate histories in research and the wider public.

The place of history in school curricula has sparked heated debate in Canada. Is Canadian history dead? Who killed it? Should history be put in the service of nation? Can any history be truly inclusive? New Possibilities for the Past advances the debate by shifting the focus from what should be included in a nation’s history to how we should think about and teach the past. Museum educators, secondary school teachers, historians, and history educators document the state of history education research. They go on to consider the implications of the research for classrooms from kindergarten to graduate school and in other contexts such as museums, virtual environments, and public institutional settings. This book takes into consideration the perspectives of indigenous peoples, the citizens of Quebec, and advocates of citizenship education. This volume sets a comprehensive research agenda for educators, policy-makers, and historians to help students learn about and, more importantly, understand the significance of the past.

A collection of thoughtful and incisive examinations of how we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments. In our everyday lives, we navigate a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet we rarely consider systematically how or why we derive meaning from this sea of the visual. Nor do we typically contemplate the effect it has on our motivations and actions as individuals and collectives. Visual Futures provides a new lens through which to analyze and challenge established perspectives, norms, and practices surrounding the visual. This edited collection ruminates on how visuality and the visual provoke a new kind of cultural exchange and explores the relationships, intersections, and collisions between visuality and visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection, educative practices, civic development, and social development.

On the occasion of the retirement of Paul Smeyers, this book considers the state and status of the philosophy and history of education today. Over the last 20 years, the conditions in which research takes place have changed considerably. They have done so in ways that are often less than favourable to disciplines such as history and philosophy of education, and the space and time for the practices that constitute these disciplines – of reading, of writing, of collegiality – is increasingly under pressure. During this time, the Research Community on the History and Philosophy of Educational Research has convened annually to bring its critical lenses to bear on these emergent conditions and to suggest ways that educational research might, or ought to, be done otherwise. As co-founder and co-convenor of the Research Community, this volume explores and recounts Paul Smeyers' development of Wittgensteinian scholarship and its legacy in education, his formative role in the development of philosophy of education as an international field, his many international collaborations, the “useless” educational-philosophical deepening of concepts, and the wider educational-philosophical import of this. This gives rise to consideration of the failure of these fields to halt the changes in the governance and status of the university that threatens them, and those practices that remain and that are emerging in academia that we wish to protect, to pass on to the next generation of researchers in these fields.

"This collection explores and articulates the landscape of history education research and practice in Canada. It does this to help define and refine the research agenda in history teaching and practice, which at the present time take place against a backdrop of public concern about Canadians' abysmal knowledge of their own history and a perceived need for more, and then even more, Canadian history in schools. It is crucial that scholarly research be pursued thoughtfully and in a cohesive manner and that classroom practice be informed by the finding of this research."--Intro.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

Five Pedagogies, A Thousand Possibilities aims at providing the groundwork for articulating sites of enriching pedagogies so that critical hope and the possibility of transformation may stay alive.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is arguably the preeminent French philosopher of the last century, and interest in his thought is growing exponentially. This volume celebrates and interrogates the thought of Merleau-Ponty by drawing upon both classic and state-of-the-art assessments, some available in English here for the first time. The result is an essential collection of essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's importance in terms of his originality vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition, and examine his major insights about such contemporary concerns as subjectivity, the question of the other and sociality, the natural and the human, art, the sensible and the intelligible, and the philosophical study of language. Penetrating and illuminating, these essays firmly install Merleau-Ponty among the most innovative and critically debated thinkers of the past half century.