Learning to Stop: Mindfulness Meditation as Anti-violence Pedagogy

Low, Remy Y.S.

This book is a philosophical and historical study that explores how meditative practices for cultivating mindfulness can be regarded as a unique form of education against violence—one that emphasizes stopping and contemplation as a necessary precursor to action. It brings together the idiosyncratic but insightful musings on violence by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek with recent research on mindfulness and violence as a lens. Using this lens, it looks at two exemplary educators and how they taught mindfulness meditation as a way of resisting the types of violence they and their students faced: the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh amidst the brutality of the Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and the African-American studies professor and cultural critic bell hooks in the face of systemic oppression in the United States of the 1980s.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2023-04-01

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9783031287213

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-28722-0

Dimensions: 210cm x148cm

Pages: 117