Difference as Ethical Encounter

Abstract

This article uses Deleuze and Levinas and those who work with their ideas to explore pedagogical encounters across difference in two texts: A collective biography story of a White teacher in an Indigenous school and an excerpt from the landmark “Sorry” speech by the previous Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It begins with a reflection on the methodology of collective biography and speculates on how difference, and ethical encounters across difference, might be rethought in ways that demassify categories of difference and at the same time recognize the exigencies of historical disadvantage.