Building resonance axes in a time of alienation
(2025) Resonance, Education and Adolescence — Location: online (15.October.2025)
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- Abstract
- Adolescence is a time where alienation runs rampant. Hartmut Rosa defines alienation as lack of compatibility between a subject and a segment of the world, resulting in a “mute” relation. During adolescence, one’s body, self and relationships change rapidly, requiring constant adjustments that won’t always succeed right away in reestablishing responsive contact with the world. As Rosa points out in Resonance, this period begins with the inevitable transitional phase of puberty, an alienating rite of passage wherein the body is experienced as an external obstacle to one’s relationship with the world. At the same time, this episode of alienation is also a key enabling factor for future experiences of fruitfully appropriating the world’s many facets of otherness. Following Rosa, it is because we have had experiences of the world as silent, indifferent and/or hostile that we develop a sensitivity to resonance. However, this is only true to the extent that our experiences of alienation have been healthily integrated. Adolescence, while necessarily a time of alienation, is also when we lay the groundwork for our future resonance axes. My contribution seeks to examine two dimensions of this groundwork in the context of education. First, I will raise the question of how schools handle teenage alienation. Indeed, resonance theory sheds light on an important opportunity to generate resonance by taking care of the ways that experiences of alienation are welcomed and collectively digested in the classroom. Teenage alienation takes many forms and touches on many strong evaluations; to the extent that space is provided for the collective interpretation of such experiences, students may have a unique experience of speaking in their own voice and being heard. In this view, curriculum could expressly aim to provide material that allows for engagement with both poles: alienation and resonance. Such an educational framework would perhaps allow inevitable alienation to be processed without risk of exacerbation, and the shared experience of discussing alienation as such may itself constitute a resonant experience. Second, I will take a critical look at resonance theory’s apparent incompatibility with the explicit development and evaluation of skills. Rosa has heavily criticized the skills approach. In his view, it necessarily leads to competition, which he identifies as a primary “resonance-killer”. And yet, skills are like resources, in that a certain amount is crucial for the emergence and maintenance of stable resonance axes. Similarly, competition is an inherent part of the human experience, regardless of economic structures. Still, the evaluation of skills – though important – can be an alienating experience not only for students but also for teachers, insofar as they feel forced to reduce their appreciation of students to a number. Among other things, I will explore how alienating aspects of evaluation and competition can be addressed reflexively in the classroom in such a way that may re-introduce resonance potential into the process, as well as policy shifts that might enable this. Skill development is an unavoidable element of education, and resonance theory would do well to find ways to make peace with it. I will close by making a connection between these two issues and the development of responsibility. Giving voice to students’ experiences of alienation may be a fruitful path toward the development of resonant pedagogical relationships, which, as I have argued in a forthcoming article, develop dispositional attention to the value of one’s actions.
- Affiliations
St. Lawrence University University of Salzburg
Citations
Cuneen, N. (2025). Building resonance axes in a time of alienation. Resonance, Education and Adolescence, online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269671