Description: A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner
On Liking the Other: Queer Subjects and Religious Discourses studies the intersection of religious and queer discourses in teacher education. It looks at the sometimes difficult topics rooted in these two particular discourses, which are often seen as unwelcome in both public and private educational spaces. In engaging in such a conversation, the authors seek to think about the ways that these discourses, while steeped in discontent, dilemma, and difficulty, might also offer ways to reorient ourselves amidst twenty-first century educational realities. More to the point, the text puts queer histories and logics into conversations with theologies through the concept of liking. Eschewing the typical antagonism that often defines the relationships between religious and queer discourses, this book seeks to look for resonances and overlaps that might provide new habits for conducting the work of meeting in teacher education classrooms and educational worlds. On Liking the Other is an excellent text for a variety of classrooms and courses.Brief description: Kevin J. Burke, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education and an affiliate faculty member of Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies as well as in the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. He teaches courses on masculinities, Queer Theory, religion and public education, as well as on the practice of, and evaluation in, community based, youth centered literacy research. His most recent books include Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistic Praxis: Embodied Inquiry in Youth Art Spaces (co-authored with Ruth Harman, 2020) and Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education: Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning (co-edited with Mary Juzwik, Jennifer Stone, and Denise Davila, 2019).
Review Quotes: "Burke and Greteman have together done the apparently impossible. By refusing to accept the polarities either in their profession or our society, and approaching tense issues from the side, rather than head on, they have made possible an anthropology of teaching which is able to be simultaneously respectful and embracing of both queer and religious ways of being within the overall adventure of education. Loving, liking, considering, failing, forgiving, reconciling, and daring: each one of these is filled out and given a life-giving role in the way in which teaching leads us out and on."--James Alison, Catholic Priest, Theologian and Author