Educating for anti-complicity: A pedagogical response to political and structural violence

This article addresses the thorny issue of complicity in global reckonings of political and structural violence and asks: What does it mean to educate students for anti-complicity, when educators, students and their communities are already steeped into institutions, norms, and practices that engage in political and/or structural violence, as perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders? What are the risks of pedagogies that cultivate affective practices of anti-complicity in the classroom? Drawing on literature that brings together affect theory and political thought, this paper interrogates how thinking about both complicity and resistance in non-binary terms can help address past and present instances, norms and practices of political and structural violence. It is argued that the development of anti-complicity pedagogies that recognize the complexities of “shared complicities” provides a nuanced way to teach and learn about political and structural violence and their implications in everyday life.