Deborah Britzman is a practicing psychoanalyst and philosopher of education. Her research connects psychoanalysis with pedagogy, teacher education, and the idea of vulnerability as a "constitutive inequality."

We discuss her recent book When History Returns, which brings together theories of learning with the paradoxes of social strife. It argues that history "returns" through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict.

We also discuss Anticipating Education, a collection of some of the most influential pieces of her writing. Some of these pieces examine the dilemmas created by anticipating education, provoked when teachers, students, and professors encounter the unknown while trying to know emotional situations affecting their waiting, wanting, and wishing for teaching and learning.

The challenge, for Britzman, is to imagine a way that education can work “in the service of humane public life” and “ethical reparation when humans have never lived in a world without violence and when dwelling in the failure of peace and in histories of war may invoke cynicism and hopelessness.”

To this end, she reflects on her experiences growing up in Ohio and hearing “many teachers and parents” say that they “felt the students [shot by the National Guard at Kent State University] deserved to be killed.” Consensus around who deserves killing can spur and be spurred by what Britzman calls a “failure of imagination… and an attraction to quick solutions.”In this moment where there are too many crises to count, Britzman's "light touch" gives those fearful of political complexity a way in, and that means something right now.

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