The Pedagogies of Performative Afterlife

Performative Verbs and Performative Acts

Searle (1989) posits a set of adequacy criteria for any account of the meaning and use of performative verbs, such as order or promise. Central among them are: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-verifying; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning. He then argues th...

The Prolific Afterlife of Whales

o u g a lv es On a routine expedition in 1987, oceanographers in the submersible Alvin were mapping the typically barren, nutrient-poor seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin, off the shore of southern California. On the final dive of the trip, the scanning sonar detected a large object on the seafloor. Piercing through the abyssal darkness down at 1,240 meters, Alvin’s headlights revealed a 20-m...

Searching for Disruptive Pedagogies: Matching Pedagogies to the Technologies

Editorial: Images of Afterlife

What would human life look like if it were not about images of this world and the otherworld? Could such a life sustain people, their societies and cultures in an appropriate way? These are questions, which preoccupy the contributors to this special issue. The goal of this volume is to gather a large scale of discussions to highlight how the questions may be taken seriously. Also, the aim is to...

Performative Framing: Dza Patrul Rinpoche’s Performative Pedagogy

This essay explores the pedagogy of Dza Patrul Rinpoche (1808–1887), a well-respected Buddhist teacher from Eastern Tibet, by considering examples where Patrul frames his teachings as oratorical performances. Patrul operates under the guiding pedagogical principle that self-promoting performance is good teaching. The term “performance” describes the competitive exchanges that appear in certain ...