New Lines of Flight? Negotiating Religions and Cultures in Gendered Educational Spaces

Citation

I'Anson J & Jasper A (2010) New Lines of Flight? Negotiating Religions and Cultures in Gendered Educational Spaces. Discourse : Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies, 5 (2), pp. 75-98. http://jisctechdis.ac.uk/assets/documents/subjects/prs/PrsDiscourse/147.pdf

Abstract
First paragraph: In the final chapter of What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994:203-4) draw upon an image from D.H. Lawrence (1961/1928) that both affords insight into how poetry is produced, and the ways in which uncertainty is kept at bay, whether in philosophy, science, or the arts: People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent? Wordsworth's spring or Cezanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions? Our paper is concerned with: (i) the kinds of firmaments that are constructed in religious studies: how certainty in regard to difference is produced and what the effects of this are; (ii) an ethical problematic of hospitality to difference: in which we inquire into what the implications of such hospitality might be as regards making sense of difference whether this be characterised in cultural, religious or gender terms; and (iii) the effects of becoming open to difference: is it possible to characterise the performative dynamics of this openness? And, if so, what forms might these take?

Journal
Discourse : Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies: Volume 5, Issue 2