ABSTRACT
This chapter chronicles some of the traumas of migration: from losing home, family, cherished possessions, and the known and familiar, to what is often a traumatic crossing of oceans, negotiating forbidding walls and barbed wire, as well as hostility on eventual arrival. Hostility may be an outcome of ‘hosts’ living in marginalized communities who themselves have been traumatized by powerlessness and bewildering, overly rapid economic and cultural dislocation. The chapter uses auto/biographical, narrative material and an interdisciplinary psychosocial framing to consider the role and nature of adult education in these encounters. An adult education with space to tell and share stories, and to feel viscerally welcomed by the other; where we can come to appreciate common, vulnerable humanity as well as conviviality, generating in turn generosity and collaborative learning. There can be a strong spiritual sensibility in these encounters, where mercy, pity, truth and love find expression, and the dynamics of self/other recognition are realized in good enough ways. To be deprived of a voice means to be deprived of agency over our own lives. It also means to slowly but systematically become alienated from our own journeys.
