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Accepted Paper:

On becoming restorative: the radical challenge of tenderness  
Laura McLauchlan (University of New South Wales)

Paper short abstract:

Careful attention to relationality (both inter and intra-personal) offers transformative potential in a range of practices. It also challenges individualist ontologies and structures. In this paper we offer speculative attention to possible languages and preconditions for radically tender dialogue.

Paper long abstract:

Taking the tender as careful attention to relationality, the urgency of working with tender skill is clear. In a range of practices from restorative justice to radical pedagogy, responsive ethnography and community mediation, effective and transformative work requires skilled recognition of and cooperation with relationality. Such practices share commitments to holding space for both the integrity of participants while also recognising the ways in which lives are connections that comprise them. In such approaches, notions of opposition may shift as enemies within require befriending alongside those without. Such modes of attending to reality, however, may raise ontological challenges for those of us raised in paradigms of individualist-rational-action; concepts of blame, responsibility and justice rest on the assumption of bounded individuals. Secular-rational languages of linear accountability may give little space for the realities of such tender-critical practices.

We might not wish to be open to all others or their worlds (Candea 2010). Indeed, to refuse to do so may be the important work of boundary maintenance (Haraway 2001). However, when it matters to open to one another, how do we create the pre-conditions—both ontological and practical—for the possibility of working well with the relational? And how to voice such deeply-responsive and mutually-worked practices? In this paper, using both prose and movement, we offer a speculative consideration of emerging languages for holding a tender critical openness to life.

Panel P02
Towards a tender critical theory
  Session 1 Wednesday 4 December, 2019, -