According to philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, alterity can exist only in its infinite and fluid nature in which the aspects of it that exceed the human ability to fully understand it remain unthematized in language. Levinas sees the encounter between self and other as the moment that instigates ethical responsibility, a moment so vital to avoiding mastering what is external to oneself that it should replace Western philosophy’s traditional emphasis on being as philosophy’s basis, or “First Philosophy.” Levinas’s conceptualization of language as a fluid, non-mastering saying, which one must continually re-enliven against a congealing and mastering said, is at the heart of his ethical project of relating to the other of alterity with ethical responsibility, or proximity. The imaginative poetic language that some contemporary poetry enacts, resonates with Levinas’s ethical motivations and methods for responding to alterity. The following project investigates facets of this question in relation to Levinas: how do the contemporary poets Peter Blue Cloud, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, and Robert Hass use poetic language uniquely to engage with alterity in an ethical way, thus allowing it to retain its mystery and infinite nature? I argue that by keeping language alive in a way similar to a Levinasian saying, which avoids mastering otherness by attending to its uniqueness and imaginatively engaging with it, they enact an ethical response to alterity. As a way of unpacking these ideas, this inquiry will investigate the compelling, if unsettled, convergence in the work of Levinas and that of Blue Cloud, Graham, Harjo, and Hass by unfolding a number of Levinasian-informed close readings of major poems by these writers as foregrounding various forms of Levinasian saying. / Ph. D.

The aim is to examine how children create and embody ethics by analyzing their encounters and how possibilities are conditioned by the framework surrounding them. The focus has been on the following problem areas: Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters with regard to frameworks, rules and order Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters related to the teachers’ approach Children’s encounters in play from an ethical perspective Children’s encounters with nature from an ethical perspective The theoretical standpoint is ”the ethics of an encounter” from Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of ethics of alterity. In ethics which precedes being itself, the ethical becoming and its relational aspects appear in the encounter with the Other. The tools of analysis are mainly drawn from previous pedagogical/didactical research in ethics which highlights the ethical conditions, such as listening, encounters with diversity and differences, and preschool/school as an ethical space. The study is based on one year of ethnographical field studies relying on participant observations, video observations, focus groups, stimulated recalls and guided tours. The empirical findings show that rules and frameworks which regulate the everyday life of the preschool classes are repeatedly negotiated. The negotiations about “what’s what?”, where both the children and the teachers are involved, take place on a verbal and a bodily level. In the pedagogues’ approach, the listening is a central and complex condition for the ethical space in the preschool classes. In the children’s encounters in play and in their encounters with nature the relational aspect becomes clear. The ethical boundaries and the fixing of those boundaries are discussed in connection with the idea of the ethics of an encounter and the vision of preschool/school as a potential ethical space.