Introduction
This article is informed by Freirean critical pedagogy, foundational to which is critical dialogue. Its contribution to intercultural studies is based on the idea of intercultural dialogue as critical dialogue according to parameters set out by Freire (1970): critical hope, faith, trust, love, humility and critical thinking. These parameters are synonymous with the concepts we espouse and explore through our dialogic approach. For us, this critical pedagogy approach to dialogue is integral both to our intercultural pedagogy and to our research, which are inseparable in our praxis.
Building on Freirean principles, we propose openness, interconnectedness, solidarity and empathetic witnessing (as praxes of love), and critical hope as the principles that underpin our approach to dialogue. The methodology employed to analyse our Freirean-informed dialogic approach is poetry, which is used to distil our dialogue (Davis, 2021). We ethnopoetically analyse and poetically render a dialogue informed by the poem ‘The otter and the seal’ written by the first author. The poetical rendering is theoretically informed by Dúchas, a pre-colonial, Gaelic way of being and knowing, and by le dire as a poetic form of communication (Levinas, 1985, 1998). Through this poetically informed dialogue, we wish to disrupt Western perceptions of how we come to know (Phipps, 2019), proposing an approach to language that recalls Glissant’s (1997) ‘clamor for the right to opacity’ (p. 194) to acknowledge the expansive possibilities for knowing fulfilled by poetry (Césaire, 1982: 17–32).
The context for this article is the dehumanisation of Palestinians. We wish to disrupt silences in academic discourse while an ongoing plausible genocide (International Court of Justice, 2024a, 2024b) unfolds in Gaza. As critical scholars protected by academic freedom and freedom of expression (University and College Union, 2009; UNESCO, 1997; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2024a, 2024b), we see this as a way to deploy our privilege as a form of activism (against dehumanisation). As such, we recognise that in the presence of inequality and oppression we are called to make a stand, to take a position and ethically commit to dialogue as a way to ameliorate injustice, even if only within the practice of pedagogy and academic discourse. We do not propose this contribution to academic discourse as a final act; we recognise that the process of becoming is facilitated by conscientização (Freire, 1970), and that this deep criticality reached through dialogue ‘is never finished or fixed, but rather dynamic and continuous’ (Awayed-Bishara, 2025: 9). Every act is an act of conscientização, or consciousness raising, and no act can be a final act, for that would be an anathema to a future generating critical hope harnessed through dialogue. Therefore, through this article, we offer a way to configure intercultural dialogue informed by critical understanding and an emphasis on social justice.
In this endeavour, we give careful and due consideration to the intergenerational trauma experienced by Palestinians since 1948 (Veronese et al., 2023), including the siege imposed by Israel in Gaza prior to 9 October 2023, and to the intensification of this pain and suffering in the days since. We carefully acknowledge the trauma experienced by Israeli citizens caused by the attacks on 7 October. Our empathy extends to all Jewish people for whom that day inflamed the intergenerational trauma of historical persecution. We stand in solidarity against anti-Semitism, and with those who have experienced it, those who experience it, and those who live in fear of it. Likewise, we stand in solidarity against all forms of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Any justice-focused response must acknowledge the oppressive life conditions of Palestinians in Gaza and in the occupied territories in the West Bank (United Nations General Assembly, 2024). Underscoring the ethos of non-violence with which this article is imbued, we emphasise our commitment to the Freirean ideal that liberation from oppression lies in dialogue (Freire, 1970; Holmes, 2014; Phipps, 2014, 2022; UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Languages and Arts, 2023).
The work of both authors in the field of language and intercultural studies is positioned within an ethical and critical framework aiming to address asymmetrical relations in knowledge production and in the real world. We believe that interculturalists are called to make a stance and attend to the emancipatory possibilities of the field. The first author writes from her position as a woman from the rural north of Ireland, a position influenced by the widely recognised colonial experience of the Irish (Murphy, 2009). An intergenerational wound of exile (Donovan, 1996) attributable to colonisation’s legacy has evoked a developed sense of affinity with the displaced, dispossessed and oppressed. This positionality informs a decolonial embrace of the poetic, the mythic and the spiritual, and of embodied sensory ways of being and/as knowing. From there, she seeks to embody a poet as witness position (Heaney, 1995) and to develop an intercultural criticality which sees creativity as a transformative liberation impulse (Anzaldúa, 2015). The second author writes from a position of critical interculturality and feminist solidarity that compels her to respond ethically to the unfolding tragedy that we witness on a daily basis on our screens, from a feminist ethics of non-violence (Cavarero, 2021), which places solidarity, relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence with the other as the springboard for ethical action. We are at pains to point out that we do not write for, or on behalf of, Palestinians. Rather, we attend to this article as an epistle of solidarity and compassion to besieged Palestinians, to those connected to Palestine in the diaspora, to minoritised Palestinians in Israel and to others called to this struggle for social justice for and with Gaza.
The article begins with the poem ‘The otter and the seal’, written by the first author to grasp hope, to salve despair and to reclaim connection. After that, we set out the worsening tragedy of the context of the ongoing plausible genocide in Gaza. We then introduce the theoretical underpinnings of the article in the form of Levinasian le dire and le dit and Dúchas, and we proceed with the ethnopoetically informed poetic methodology. The poetically rendered dialogic analysis of the ‘The otter and the seal’ is interspersed throughout the article, enacting as praxis the commitment of both authors to the theoretical notion that the poetic modality represents a profound eruption of le dire in le dit of academic language. In each poetic intervention, we are in dialogue with a Palestinian poetic voice or a poetic voice for Palestine in the form of an epigraph.
Context
As part of a longer history of dispossession that began in 1948 (Chomsky and Pappé, 2010), Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including West Jerusalem, in 1967 (International Court of Justice, 2024a; United Nations, 2017; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2024a, 2024b). In 2005, it withdrew military installations from Gaza and members of the Israeli population that had settled there, but it retained effective control of the territory (Erakat, 2019). Since 2007, Palestinians in Gaza have been under siege (International Court of Justice, 2024a, 2024b), a form of spatial violence that targets infrastructure to disrupt social, biological and environmental life, the harmful effects of which are cumulative (Fassetta et al., 2017; Imperiale, 2018; Winter, 2016). For more than 16 years, the flow of people, resources and goods in and out of Gaza has been impeded, leading to a context of de-development that has suppressed human potential and flourishing (Imperiale, 2021; United Nations, 2017). Only humanitarian imports have been allowed into the Gaza Strip, not including electricity, and fuel is rationed (Imperiale, 2018; Winter, 2016). As a result of siege, Gaza has experienced food and water shortages, which exacerbate climate vulnerability (Mason et al., 2012).
As well as the impacts on the environment, on the food and water, and of siege, Palestinians in Gaza (over 70 per cent of whom are refugees) have been experiencing increasing poverty and unemployment, and health (mental and physical) and educational crises (Imperiale, 2018). The impacts of siege have been further exacerbated by four military bombardments in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, leading to further losses of life, infrastructure and hope (Imperiale, 2021). Winter (2016) defined the situation in Gaza as a suspended catastrophe, in which conditions ‘consistently approximate a downright catastrophe … and the impending threat of disaster is kept alive’ (p. 313). Indiscriminate widespread bombing, including in humanitarian safe zones, repeated internal forced displacement, induced starvation and torture mean that the catastrophe is no longer approximate, disaster is no longer impending – both are painfully, heretofore unimaginably, urgent. The immense grief caused by this loss of life, displacement and epistemicide (Weiner, 2023), and the erasure of the conditions necessary to carry on living (Atallah and Ihmoud, 2024; Echchaibi, 2024), underpin the stance adopted in this article in relation to the ethics of the other.
Le dire and le dit
In the ethical philosophy of Levinas (1985, 1998), the encounter with the other is framed through language in a twofold manner. On the one hand, we notice the other phenomenologically, and we employ the categories of knowledge to describe the other through an objectifying gaze. On the other, the face of the other is experienced ethically, engendering a sense of responsibility. For Levinas (1998), this twofold relation with the other as either objectifying or ethical is expressed through two distinct modalities of language, le dit (the said) and le dire (saying). Le dit is the language of knowledge that fixes the other through pre-established categorisations and the objectifying and quantifying gaze of reason.
For Levinas (1985), le dire (saying) is not opposed to, rather it lives within, le dit (the said) as the irreducible difference between content and meaning that is never fully captured by the abstract language of reason:
That the saying must bear a said is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations. But the saying is the fact that before the face I do not simply remain there contemplating it, I respond to it. The saying is a way of greeting the Other, but to greet the Other is already to answer for him. (p. 88)
In the modality of le dire, the act of speaking to the other facing me unfolds in a manner that implicates me in this relation. Due to this physical proximity, I am compelled to respond and to act. In Levinasian ethics, during this engagement in the here and now of interaction, the I decentres to enter in an ethical relation with the other that is non-utilitarian, non-objectifying. In this sense, le dire emphasises the irreducibility of the other to the totalising and oppressive categories of the self (Ferri, 2018). It must be noted that Levinas falls short of his own philosophy of the other when directly confronted with the question of Palestine and Palestinians in a much-quoted interview in 1982 with Shlomo Malka after the massacres in Sabra and Shatila that was published in English with the title Ethics and Politics (Levinas, 1989). For the purposes of this article we are reading Levinas against that position and we invite the readers to engage with the interview and to refer also to Critchley (2004) and Caro (2009) for a critical discussion and contextualisation of Levinas’ position on the relation of ethics to politics. We position our discussion in terms of an attempt to bring to the surface le dire from traditional academic discourse, reclaiming opacity (Glissant, 1997) as an ethical response to the other. Indeed, we argue here that, when taken to the extremes of objectification, let dit dehumanises the other relegating them a ‘zone of non-being’ (Fanon, 1986). For us, poetry represents one way to reclaim le dire as the irreducible unsaid of le dit (Ferri, 2018) and establish the ground for interconnectedness.
Dúchas
The pre-colonial Gaelic concept of Dúchas (in Irish Gaelic) or Dùthchas (in Scottish Gaelic) encompasses a spiritual connection to landscape. As a pre-colonial way of knowing, Dúchas stands in contrast to traditional Western philosophy by connecting us to the spiritual and the non-human through nature. Although the concept loses its emotional energy through translation to English (MacInnes, 2006), it can be partially translated as ‘being in place’, or as referring to an existential sense of belonging (Murphy, 2009). It is ‘a feeling of attachment to a place, a tongue, and a tradition, a belief that one belongs to a sustaining cultural or communal energy’ (O’Searcaigh, 2009: 2). Meighan (2022) adopts Dúchas/Dùthchas as an ontology, a methodology and praxis which ‘goes beyond a mere “feeling” of identification with place and community to tangible conduct and action motivated by a sense of ethics, respect, and responsibility for said place and community to maintain ecological balance’ (p. 5). Central to the interpretation of Dúchas in this article is Meighan’s (2022) elucidation of it as a fluid and dynamic concept that accounts for the interconnectedness of all things. Deploying Dúchas as a lens therefore allows us to imagine interconnectedness to place and people as ‘radiating outwards in concentric circles’ (Murphy, 2009: 5). Murphy (2009) wonders how far this radiating outwards (or rippling) stretches? We respond herein: infinitely.
In the following sections, we introduce ethnopoetically informed poetry as the method employed to create the poetic dialogue inspired by the poem ‘The otter and the seal’, and we explore the ways in which this ethical call can be refused, leading to the fallacy of the other and despair, or answered, leading to critical hope. By interspersing the poetic interventions, we allow the eruption of le dire in le dit of academic language, to echo throughout with the infinity of Dúchas.
Coming to know poetically and dialogically
Adopting le dire facilitates our argument that we are ethically compelled to respond to the call of the other; that is, not to turn away from the face of the Palestinian in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in the diaspora, or minoritised within the State of Israel. When encountering the other through le dire, we are confronted with the fact that the other cannot be enclosed within the confines of culture or any other classification used to capture this otherness. The other stays other, and this is where ethical engagement is located, in this acceptance that we can never fully know the other essentially, nor do we need to, in order to recognise the fullness of their humanity; for this is love in Freirean terms (Freire, 1970). Yet our interconnectedness is inextricable, so that in this acceptance of unknowability there is in effect no other as conceptualised by ‘the West’ as an invented threat (Yohannes and Phipps, 2024). This invented threat is an oppressive fallacy perpetrated to dehumanise the other through language, as well as through violence. The idea that le dire meets le dit while it simultaneously subsists within it and yet cannot be contained within it means that difference coexists with inextricable interconnectedness, between the other and I. In this article, poetry as le dire is the engine that propels us to the articulation of this argument.
Poetry facilitates a multiplicity of knowing, accepts unknowability and rejects the reduction of knowing to a hierarchy of interpretations. Poetry does not tell, it awakens ideas. Poetry allows the reader to arrive at their own understandings, at a cognitive and sensual level (Blackledge and Creese, 2023). This espousal of opacity (Glissant, 1997) in poetry aligns with a Levinasian ethical stance based on le dire. Equally, we recognise that ‘we come to know in and through the conversations we have with people’ (Jim and Webster, 2022: 391), which is akin to the phenomenon of le dire emerging from and meeting le dit in and through dialogue (Ferri, 2014). This recognition led us to the methodological application of dialogical ethnopoetics (Jim and Webster, 2022; McElgunn, 2024; Webster, 2024). Ethnopoetics is an analytical technique that recognises the poetic function of language and the poetics inherent in the way speakers tell their stories (McAllister, 2024b) to each other; it recognises le dire in le dit. Applied ethnopoetic analysis aims to bring out the implicit structure in spoken discourse (Blommaert, 2018) and makes ‘visible and audible something more than is evident on first hearing’ (Blackledge et al., 2016: 657). By ‘unearthing the underlying poetic structure that is the essence of narrative’ (Hornberger, 2009: 349), it recognises that one’s voice is evident in one’s specific ways of speaking (Blackledge et al., 2016).
While ethnopoetics uncovers a voice, a dialogical ethnopoetics (Jim and Webster, 2022) preserves different voices simultaneously, and therefore epistemological positions that emerge in the moments during which we come to know through dialogue. It reveals the places and the ways in which different systems of meaning making meet (Blommaert, 2006), or where knowledge systems or ways of knowing confront each other (Jim and Webster, 2022); in this case, where le dit and le dire meet Dúchas in the dialogic analysis of a poem. A dialogical ethnopoetics centres the words, the ways of speaking, and the ways of knowing of those in conversation, by positioning the dialogue itself as centripetal to interpretations (Jim and Webster, 2022).
As such, in a process of triple distillation, within a poetry as knowing framework, we take an ethnopoetically informed approach to present a poetically rendered version of our recorded collaborative dialogic analysis of ‘The otter and the seal’ (for a full description of the process of applied ethnopoetic analysis overlayed by poetic rendering, see McAllister, 2024a, 2024b). We approached the recorded dialogues reflexively, led by the Freirean maxims that to speak a true word is to transform the world, and that dialogue is an act of creation in which the world is named by men and women and not on their behalf (Freire, 1970). Through this approach, we sought to cultivate a creative dialogic space of radical openness (hooks, 1989) and critical exchange (Li, 2018). We sought to harness and reflect on the synergy of le dit/le dire and Dúchas as a model for empathetically witnessing and responding to injustice and oppression, founded on the Freirean principles of critical hope, solidarity as love, and consciousness raising.
To return to our earlier stated purpose for writing this article and for advocating critical intercultural dialogue as an ethical stance in this effort, we emphasise that when language fails us in its objectifying modality, we must go to another modality in solidarity, such as the poetic, through the spiritual, the mythic and the embodied. When language fails to convey the horror, poetry speaks to us from the depths of le dire. We despair when language fails us, and when we despair, language leaves us (Phipps, 2012). In these moments of disruption, reaching into a poetic modality is a way to facilitate a reconnection as a practice of critical hope. Poetry discloses possibilities to embrace contemplation, and to imbue academic thinking, with its binaries and rigidly formed domains of knowledge, with a language that respects opacity. The ethnopoetic analysis of our dialogue and its poetic rendering is our methodological attempt at conveying this ethical and poetic approach as consciousness raising.
The dialogic echo of the epigraphs
To facilitate the infinitely outward rippling of interconnectedness that we earlier framed through Dúchas, we centre Palestinian voices and voices for Palestine in our poetically rendered dialogue, through the epigraphs. As le dire always emerges (even unsaid) from le dit, we have imagined our dialogue as an echo reverberating from the epigraphs and extending towards our readers. We do not aim for transparency of meaning, but for the obliquity in the echo of poetic language to reverberate infinitely towards the ripples of interconnectedness, thereby expanding the intercultural dialogic space.
Reflecting the fracturing impact of the colonial violence experienced by Palestinians (El-Kurd, 2025), the voices from Palestine speak from a range of contexts: from Gaza, from the West Bank, from the scattered Palestinian diaspora and from within (or from outside) the State of Israel. Mahmoud Darwish, for example, was banned from re-entering Israel in 1973 for 26 years, while Reefat Alareer, a poet and academic from Gaza, was killed by the Israeli Defence Forces in 2023 in a targeted assassination. Nabil Echchaibi (2024) and Huka Fukhreddine (2024) are not Palestinian but scholars who, like Badwan and Phipps (2025), have cried out poetically (or screamed) for Gaza. We echo their voices too with our own, in solidarity.
Despair as disconnect
Despair is a disconnect with the ontological becoming of the fully human self. While we cannot remain in despair indefinitely, because it disrupts our becoming, it is, however, a reflection of our humanity; it is awoken by an awareness of suffering and injustice that demands a response (Petrella, 2016). We despair when images and reports of thousands of deaths are live streamed to us, the graphic imagery invoking an emotional connection to the victims (Grain and Lund, 2017). In those moments, we are viscerally confronted with the starkness of injustice, with the geopolitical and structural inequalities that inflict such unspeakable suffering on some and not on others. This disconnects us from the experience of being fully human, in our own lived reality. In those moments, when we meet the other, we are compelled to respond to the other and, being unable to respond meaningfully in the moment, we despair.
Our despair intensifies when these images are coupled with language that diminishes or dismisses the suffering of those who have died, who are wounded, who are displaced or who are orphaned, with narratives counter to those images. This disconnect between image and word is the operationalisation of ‘othering’, it is dehumanisation, and it is designed to ‘disconnect’ us from the other. In the impossibility of this disconnection, we cannot separate our humanity from the humanity of others. While despair might remind us of our own humanity and each other’s humanity, in itself it is not an act of solidarity, because it serves those in dominance (Apple, 2014), and it turns our attention away from the future (Weil, 1947), and therefore away from possibilities for transformation through solidarity. When we despair, we long for hope – a deep and ontological need (Freire, 1998). We are compelled to seek out hope, and it is through a practice of critical hope as the struggle to improve life (Imperiale et al., 2017) that we enact and sustain solidarity, and are reconnected to our unfolding human selves and to others.
Even though to despair at the relentlessness of the horror we are witnessing in Palestine is to be human, we urge that we cannot turn away from reaching towards a more just future, or from sharing the burden borne by Palestinians of imagining that future into existence. Palestinian poet, Fady Joudah (2024) writes:
I write for the future
because my present is demolished
I fly to the future
To retrieve my demolished present
as a legible past. (p. 3)
Critical hope to reconnect
Critical hope is an intellectual, cognitive, emotional, embodied, spiritual and intuitive response to injustice; both as a conceptual lens and as a practice, it creates space for all of these domains and it recognises their inseparability (Bozalek et al., 2014; Grain and Lund, 2017; Imperiale et al., 2017; Zembylas, 2014). Critical hope espouses the notion that ‘I am my brother’s keeper’, and it drives the struggle to improve the human condition (Freire, 1998). Hope dissipates into hopelessness and despair without that struggle (Freire, 2014; Imperiale, 2017). Through critical hope, we are not only sustained, but reconnected, recreated.
Hope is born of pain (Phipps, 2012), and we move towards it while acknowledging and attending to the pain of hopelessness. While naive hope without struggle leads to despair (Freire, 1998) and sustains despair, critical hope is ‘an action oriented response to contemporary despair’ (Bozalek et al., 2014, p. 1), and it propels us through despair (Grain and Lund, 2017; Solnit, 2016). Critical hope in Freirean terms is not naive; it is a reaching towards utopia that requires both action and critical thinking. It is ‘an act of ethical and political responsibility that has the potential to recover a lost sense of connectedness, relationality, and solidarity with others’ (Zembylas, 2014, p. 14). Further, critical hope requires imagination and facilitates the reimagining of an unjust world:
Dúchas as a poetics of interconnectedness
Áine: It is not incidental that I met the seal. It is not incidental that in the tumult of despair, I went to the sea. I went to walk the beach in the village I was born in, in the Glens from which the people who came before me came and were exiled from and return to again and again. It is not incidental that I seek recalibration through this landscape. This was my method to dissipate despair, to cultivate hope, to imagine into existence a meaningful act of solidarity and ‘armed’ love (Freire, 1998) with oppressed Palestinians, and this led to the poem that this article is built around. This ‘pilgrimage, a peregrinatio, a seeking, quest adventure or wandering in faith and hope ... (belies) ... ’a sense of connectedness to the earth itself’ … (that) …’takes us back to the part of the self that is more ancient than we are’ (Campbell, 2016). This is Dúchas.
Dúchas as an embodied, emotional, spiritual experience is a way of being in the world that is compatible with a poetic way of being. Meeting Dúchas poetically allows us not only to experience landscape as ‘sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond visible realities’ (Heaney, 1980: 133), but also to introspectively and critically reflect on the implications of what there is to consider beyond the immediately apparent. For example, in the image of the encounter with the seal, we see a recognition of vulnerability as courage, the courage to seek connection that is transformative. The sense of connection with the seal creates the opportunity to reflect on the desire for connection with another human being or other human beings. This poetic criticality allows us to contribute to the theorisation of interconnectedness as a practice of hope.
The contemplative practice of crafting the poem that arises from initial intuitive stirrings affects a stretch in otherwise fleeting moments in time and space. This stretch occurs via the distillation of language through attentiveness to every word and line, and their arrangement on the page, to draw attention to a moment or to differentiate voice. This creative process further deepens critical analysis. We see this in the poem in the line ‘For a moment I think the otter/is the seal’; time spent on the distillation of this image facilitated further analysis of interconnectedness and the implications of that for the impossibility of separating ourselves from others, that is to say, the impossibility of ignoring the suffering of Palestinians, their dehumanisation and the dehumanisation of all. It is Dúchas that generates these moments and facilitates their recognition.
It is poetry that allows an impactful juxtaposition of a sense of connection with the natural world, and with the unnaturalness of these violences against ‘the other’. This critical-creative process as represented by ‘The otter and the seal’ affirms Dúchas as poetics, as a tributary to critical hope, a wellspring of struggle. Dúchas as a pre-colonial onto-epistemic tradition connects us with the other through le dire.
Concluding thoughts
In this article, Dúchas has acted as a midwife to our exploration of interconnectedness, which we consider to be a restorative counternarrative to the oppressive fallacy of the other. Facilitated by Dúchas, we adopted the Levinasian theoretical lens of le dire and le dit (Ferri, 2014, 2018; Levinas, 1998) to argue that a poetic lens affords and captures a modality of language that is conducive to establishing a relationship of openness that is the wellspring of intercultural dialogue beyond essentialist perspectives of self and other. We conceptualised Dúchas as concentric circles that ripple outward infinitely and, guided by le dire, we created our dialogue as a response to the call of the other.
bell hooks (1989) quotes a line from the poem ‘The burning of paper instead of children’ by Adrianne Rich, ‘this is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you’ (p. 16), to remind us that marginalised voices articulate their own sense of being from a place of struggle, of reclaiming a sense of self that is not the one of dominant thinking. However, language is also a place of possibility, of hope and of connectedness. hooks continues: ‘Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination – a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you’ (p. 16).
Using poetry is for us one way to imagine language as a site of a praxis of hope and solidarity that begins from the margins of academic discourse to recentre intercultural dialogue in terms that refuse to objectify the other, leaving open spaces to uncover ways of knowing which would otherwise remain oblique. Under the conditions for dialogue that we set out here, we argue that the reach of the reverberations of the echo of le dire is greater and that the outward rippling effect of Dúchas is wider. Enacting as praxis, or teaching and learning about and through such a configuration of intercultural dialogue, which is creative and collaborative, has transformative potential. Such a configuration is characterised by love (as solidarity and empathic witnessing), cultivates critical hope, and is open to de-/pre-colonial ways of knowing and world views (such as, but not limited to, poetry and Dúchas). For educators in the field, that potential lies in unfreezing voices silenced by institutional normative expectations (Blommaert, 2008) informed by the coloniality of language (Li and García, 2022). We suggest that this approach to intercultural dialogue may lead to possibilities, pertinent for interculturalists and intercultural educators working to raise awareness of the oppressive injustices linked to othering, and perpetuated or restored through language. We hereby beckon the field towards the fullness of the potential it offers, for conceptualising and practising ethical responses to the injustice of the ongoing violence and the silences surrounding the dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Alison Phipps, Khwala Badwan and Miguel Pérez-Milans for their reading of this article, and for their elegant, thoughtful and considerate suggestions.
Declarations and conflicts of interest
Research ethics statement
Not applicable to this article.
Consent for publication statement
Not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of interest statement
The authors declare no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the authors during peer review of this article have been made. The authors declare no further conflicts with this article.
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