Other Positions

Personal meanings are always paradoxical. The meanings we construct, while seemingly ours alone, never solely belong to us. Always asserted in each of our voices are the intentions of others, the ambiguity of language, the antagonisms of meaning, appearance, and representation, and the contradictions that open and suppress what we take to be the unique. Unlike David Hunt, I voice the messiness of personal meanings, the fact that when we work with personal meanings, we are necessarily encountering controversy: the push and pull of significations, of our affective investments and fears, and of the lacunae among the felt, the expressed, and the repressed. Admitting such a paradox does not reduce personal meanings to personal problems or to egocentric preoccupations. That Hunt infers such reductions can only serve to position useless oppositions that denigrate one moment in order to valorize another. The intriguing tension is that personal meanings are always situated in the social, the cultural, and the historical. And these dynamics cannot be transcended. In counterdistinction to Hunt, my argument is that there is not one source for personal meanings but rather, contesting discourses that we take up, put down, borrow, and reaccentuate to make our own. And because of this latter struggle, personal meanings, like language itself, are never unitary, stable, or complete (Bakhtin, 1986). David Hunt's response raises three questions for me. First, given that culture and history are produced by humans, when does the cultural and the historical denigrate humanity? Second, insofar as all people have the capacities to make meanings, how do these meanings come to fashion and transform experiences? Finally, given the difficulties of changing schools, how can we work within critical traditions in empower

Epistemology · Sociology · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

• Kelly’s story

  Julie Alderton•Gender and Education•2017

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• Reframing teacher education and teaching

  Open Access•G Johnson•Teaching and Teacher Education•1997

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• The Dialogic Imagination

  M M Bakhtin, Michael Holquist et al.•The Dialogic Imagination•1982

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