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Discussing issues around race and racism often leads to unproductive stances such as defensiveness, denial, guilt, blame, or dysfunctional silence. Effectively addressing these stances is crucial for productive debate and action toward racial understanding and the undoing of racism. While numerous scholarship and professional development programs focus on critical and anti-racist pedagogies in higher education to tackle these unproductive stances, overcoming dichotomous thinking (i.e., "us" versus "them") and shifting the focus from individual stances to more systemic perspectives remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this article proposes the implementation of "rhetorical listening" as a powerful pedagogical tool that generates new vocabularies and facilitates personal and social transformation. The article explores how rhetorical listening can be conceptualized and operationalized as a pedagogical tool in a cultural studies course, specifically encouraging students to reposition themselves when engaging with societal issues related to race, such as the Black Pete debate in Flanders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the role of art in fostering political imagination, the transformative potential of art in education, and the inclusion of disability-led arts in pedagogy.

This article explores the racial semiotics of the Dutch concept of the other-lingual (de anderstalige). Multicultural discourse ostensibly encodes the otherness as merely linguistic; however, Flemish nationalist policy discourse deploys the other-lingual to discern autochthony from allochthony. Retracing the origins of this concept, we found that the concept did not originate in Dutch-speaking Europe, but we found earlier traces overseas in apartheid South Africa where the Afrikaans concept served the forced exclusion of coloured people. We conduct a semiotic analysis of the other-lingual to study how the concept racially encodes and decodes the Afrikaans language in South Africa and the Dutch language in Flanders. The dataset contains records in Dutch and Afrikaans, published in, or in regards to, the Netherlands, Suriname, Flanders (Belgium) and South Africa. Our semiotic analysis of the South African other-lingual engages with religious discourse published in 1950s South Africa. The semiotic analysis of Flemish other-lingual engages with its trajectory in Flemish Government Declarations from 1992 to 2022. The article concludes that the history of the other-lingual, revealing a racial identification between Flemings and Afrikaners, provides pivotal arguments for the contemporary understanding of race in the Dutch languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the relation between participatory arts practices and urban living has been a topic of debate. In an increasingly plural urban society, the co-presence of different social and cultural groups has created an urgent need for new ways to relate the right to individual freedom and hence diversity, to the necessity of social coherence. In this search, participatory art has gained in relevance. By addressing missing artistic forms and taking into account cultural reference patterns from the people involved, participatory arts practices are deemed to play an important role in producing new societal metaphors that go beyond the discourse of living together on the basis of a common, national history. Whereas in academic literature this has often led to ambitious social and political claims, this article turns to the social pedagogical mandate of these practices. How does participatory art concretely intervene in the social relations between people, which challenges are being addressed and which individuals are at the heart of these challenges? By reporting on the findings of semi-structured interviews with practitioners in Brussels, the – unofficial – capital of Europe, we aim to gain an empirical understanding of how these new societal metaphors may look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we introduce the special issue "Attitudes Toward Education: Kenneth Burke and New Rhetoric," which brings together a number of contributions that were first presented at the conference "Rhetoric as Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education" (Ghent University, May 2013). Kenneth Burke [1897-1993] is one of the foundational figures in the development of what is known as the "new rhetoric". The aim of the contributions to this special issue is to explore what is pedagogical about Burke's anthropological account of rhetoric and, more specifically, whether his concepts and ideas can still be relevant for educational research and practice. In this article, we briefly introduce some key concepts from Burke's rhetorical framework and we give an overview of the different contributions that are part of the special issue by summarizing how they address the educational dimension of (parts of) Burke's corpus. We end by introducing a "grammar of educational motives" to explore educational "purposes" and "implications."

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by major "turns": linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, literary, rhetorical etc. In this article we engage in the discussion about what all these turns might entail for education by elaborating on what it implies to read the world as a "text"--as is central in a semiotic approach--and by introducing new rhetoric in general, and the work of the literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke in particular, as a possible theoretical and methodological resource. We illustrate its application in the analysis of a fictional narrative. Our aim is to explore how an understanding of education as rhetoric can be integrated into the teacher education curriculum.