4
May2023
Keynote Speech by Jo-Anne Dillabough:
Implication and Critical Intellectualism in the Grey Zone of the Modern Academy in a New Age of Authoritarian Conflict: Exile, ‘Post-coloniality’ and David Scott’s ‘Problem Space’
9:00-10:30Manchester Metropolitan University
Archived events
12
April2023
A Seminar with Shmuel Lederman: Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy. A People’s Utopia Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies (University of Verona, Italy), on 12 April Shmuel Lederman will hold a seminar on his book Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy. A People’s Utopia
This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt’s political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world.
As an ESRC project, we are in contact with the Hannah Arendt Center organising the event and will be able to connect via Zoom from the classroom GS1 in the Donald McIntyre building from 2:30-5:30 to attend the seminar together. Anyone interested is invited to attend.
If you would like to join online, please connect via this link:
https://univr.zoom.us/j/4729123963
This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt’s political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world.
As an ESRC project, we are in contact with the Hannah Arendt Center organising the event and will be able to connect via Zoom from the classroom GS1 in the Donald McIntyre building from 2:30-5:30 to attend the seminar together. Anyone interested is invited to attend.
If you would like to join online, please connect via this link:
https://univr.zoom.us/j/4729123963
14:30-17:30GS1 in the Donald Mcintyre Building (Faculty of Education building).
3
February2023
Universities in crisis: police, militarization, protest and universities in PerúHosted by University of Cambridge PhD student Maria Fernanda Rodriguez, in solidarity with the scholars and students currently in struggle against state violence in Perú, this panel features Peruvian scholars Prof Cecilia Méndez (UC Santa Barbara) and Dr Patricia Oliart (Newcastle University). The event is co-hosted by KPP, CLAREC and the Universities in Crisis project.
Perú is facing a significant political crisis during which many people have been killed. You can read more about it here and the way it is affecting universities here. This event will reflect on the current situation in Perú, as well as the fate of universities during political crises, touching upon questions of university autonomy and the role of universities in politics. There will be a chance to ask questions.
The event will take place on Friday, 3rd February, 5pm UK time in GS1 in the Donald Mcintyre Building (Faculty of Education building).
There is an option to join online:
Meeting ID
979 2957 6609
Password
666881
Perú is facing a significant political crisis during which many people have been killed. You can read more about it here and the way it is affecting universities here. This event will reflect on the current situation in Perú, as well as the fate of universities during political crises, touching upon questions of university autonomy and the role of universities in politics. There will be a chance to ask questions.
The event will take place on Friday, 3rd February, 5pm UK time in GS1 in the Donald Mcintyre Building (Faculty of Education building).
There is an option to join online:
Meeting ID
979 2957 6609
Password
666881
17:00GS1 in the Donald Mcintyre Building (Faculty of Education building).
2
December 2022
The Settler Coloniality of Free SpeechThe Settler Coloniality of Free SpeechDr. Darcy Leigh
Lecturer, School of Law, Politics and Sociology University of Sussex, UK
Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of “drawing the line” between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, Dr. Leigh provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Leigh’s work argues that, far from a noble struggle against regulation, liberal politics around free speech establish oppositions between white “civilized” speech and its Indigenized racially darkened “others” as well as controlling or silencing Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech across the Anglosphere.
You can read the full published paper here https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/16/3/olac004/6628839
This event will be hybrid and while we encourage in-person attendance, if you would like to join online please register at
https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtfuCvrDIjGtOce698mYbbvmBvfAIxT9Ck
Lecturer, School of Law, Politics and Sociology University of Sussex, UK
Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of “drawing the line” between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, Dr. Leigh provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Leigh’s work argues that, far from a noble struggle against regulation, liberal politics around free speech establish oppositions between white “civilized” speech and its Indigenized racially darkened “others” as well as controlling or silencing Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech across the Anglosphere.
You can read the full published paper here https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/16/3/olac004/6628839
This event will be hybrid and while we encourage in-person attendance, if you would like to join online please register at
https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtfuCvrDIjGtOce698mYbbvmBvfAIxT9Ck
13.00Faculty of Education Room 1S7
28
October2022
Authorial power, authoritarianism, and exiled intellectuals: Syria and TurkeyZeina Al Azmeh & Jo Dillabough
In this seminar, Zeina Al Azmeh and Jo Dillabough draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to pose the following overarching question: how does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ (Honig, 2009) lead to a crisis of the intellectual or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments. They argue that the critical commitments exiled postcolonial intellectuals presume are becoming more and more untenable as authoritarianism takes hold globally and the Global Right increasingly tightens its grip on universities. These untenable commitments, often resting alongside nomadic precarity, are creating inner tensions within the postcolonial critical intellectual that are often unresolvable or at least unresolved. More importantly, they are creating a crisis of critique that renders the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as a ‘problem space’ in need of new questions and new frames of understanding.
Register in advance for this meeting here
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing
information about joining the meeting.
In this seminar, Zeina Al Azmeh and Jo Dillabough draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to pose the following overarching question: how does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ (Honig, 2009) lead to a crisis of the intellectual or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments. They argue that the critical commitments exiled postcolonial intellectuals presume are becoming more and more untenable as authoritarianism takes hold globally and the Global Right increasingly tightens its grip on universities. These untenable commitments, often resting alongside nomadic precarity, are creating inner tensions within the postcolonial critical intellectual that are often unresolvable or at least unresolved. More importantly, they are creating a crisis of critique that renders the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as a ‘problem space’ in need of new questions and new frames of understanding.
Register in advance for this meeting here
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing
information about joining the meeting.
13.00-15.00Cambridge – online
24
June2022
Moral Authority and the Academy under Attack: The Case of #Boğaziçidireniyor at Boğaziçi University
Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto
In this talk, Dr Elizabeth Buckner focuses on the question of how universities respond to authoritarian attacks on their autonomy through a close reading of faculty protests over rector appointments at Boğaziçi University (BU) in Turkey. The author draws on digital and social media accounts of the protests and interviews with displaced Turkish academics to refine the arguments in the article arguing that in their unified resistance, BU academics claim professional and moral authority over the domain of university governance and that their resistance has been particularly resonant nationally and internationally because it exposes and belies the raw political violence of the Erdoğan regime on moral, not political, terms. Exploring how one university community has resisted direct attacks on their autonomy sheds light on how universities mobilize cultural and moral authority to combat the newest iteration of political power that seeks to both undermine and claim that authority.
Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto
In this talk, Dr Elizabeth Buckner focuses on the question of how universities respond to authoritarian attacks on their autonomy through a close reading of faculty protests over rector appointments at Boğaziçi University (BU) in Turkey. The author draws on digital and social media accounts of the protests and interviews with displaced Turkish academics to refine the arguments in the article arguing that in their unified resistance, BU academics claim professional and moral authority over the domain of university governance and that their resistance has been particularly resonant nationally and internationally because it exposes and belies the raw political violence of the Erdoğan regime on moral, not political, terms. Exploring how one university community has resisted direct attacks on their autonomy sheds light on how universities mobilize cultural and moral authority to combat the newest iteration of political power that seeks to both undermine and claim that authority.
14.00-16.00Cambridge, online
20
May2022
Civic death as a mechanism of retributive punishment: Academic purges in TurkeySeçkin Sertdemir Özdemir, University of Turku and LSE
In an era when authoritarian governments increasingly target academics, Turkey’s 2016 purge of more than 6,000 academics and their diminution to civic death is conspicuous in its cruelty. Although unprecedented, this is not the first time that Turkish academics have been punished en masse. By looking at the tools with which academics have been expelled from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I attempt to develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected forms of punishment directed towards academic citizens as knowledge producers. I suggest that the 1980 coup accomplished three things: it introduced new mechanisms of punishment based on a logic of retribution instead of compensation; it changed the legal system into a regime of exception; it transformed academics into patriotic worker-citizens. The latest purges have brought an additional change in the status of academics’ citizenship, rendering them as disposable citizens forever at risk of being targeted as the ‘civic dead’.
Seçkin Sertdemir Özdemir is Collegium Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science and Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku and Visiting Fellow in the European Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science. She previously worked as a Research Fellow from 2003 to 2016 and an Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at Galatasaray University. Her recent publications include “Civic Death as a Mechanism of Retributive Punishment: Academic Purges in Turkey”, Punishment & Society (2020), “Pity the exiled: Turkish academics in exile” Journal of Refugee Studies (2019); and “Civil and Civic death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents in Turkey”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (with E. Özyürek)(2019); and “Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times: Turkey’s Academics for Peace”, Public Culture (with N. Mutluer and E. Özyürek) (2019).
In an era when authoritarian governments increasingly target academics, Turkey’s 2016 purge of more than 6,000 academics and their diminution to civic death is conspicuous in its cruelty. Although unprecedented, this is not the first time that Turkish academics have been punished en masse. By looking at the tools with which academics have been expelled from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I attempt to develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected forms of punishment directed towards academic citizens as knowledge producers. I suggest that the 1980 coup accomplished three things: it introduced new mechanisms of punishment based on a logic of retribution instead of compensation; it changed the legal system into a regime of exception; it transformed academics into patriotic worker-citizens. The latest purges have brought an additional change in the status of academics’ citizenship, rendering them as disposable citizens forever at risk of being targeted as the ‘civic dead’.
Seçkin Sertdemir Özdemir is Collegium Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science and Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku and Visiting Fellow in the European Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science. She previously worked as a Research Fellow from 2003 to 2016 and an Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at Galatasaray University. Her recent publications include “Civic Death as a Mechanism of Retributive Punishment: Academic Purges in Turkey”, Punishment & Society (2020), “Pity the exiled: Turkish academics in exile” Journal of Refugee Studies (2019); and “Civil and Civic death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents in Turkey”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (with E. Özyürek)(2019); and “Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times: Turkey’s Academics for Peace”, Public Culture (with N. Mutluer and E. Özyürek) (2019).
12.00-14.00Cambridge, online
18
March2022
Globalisation, Culture and Higher EducationSusan L Robertson, Mariano Rosenzvaig & Elizabeth Maber
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
In this presentation we ask: what does it mean to take ‘the cultural turn’ seriously, and in our case, to engage it in research on globalisation and higher education? We argue that this involves adding a cultural lens to engage with, rather than depart from, an analysis of the global political economy of higher education. This means problematising both globalisation and culture as concepts to provide clarity about the philosophical and knowledge claims being made. Our presentation is developed in two ways. We begin by firstly laying out our theoretical thinking and approach before, secondly, exploring how these conceptual resources help research three global higher education dynamics: globally competitive universities, global market making, and world class universities. We conclude by reflecting on what researchers might learn from a cultural turn, and what it means substantively, theoretically, and methodologically.
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
In this presentation we ask: what does it mean to take ‘the cultural turn’ seriously, and in our case, to engage it in research on globalisation and higher education? We argue that this involves adding a cultural lens to engage with, rather than depart from, an analysis of the global political economy of higher education. This means problematising both globalisation and culture as concepts to provide clarity about the philosophical and knowledge claims being made. Our presentation is developed in two ways. We begin by firstly laying out our theoretical thinking and approach before, secondly, exploring how these conceptual resources help research three global higher education dynamics: globally competitive universities, global market making, and world class universities. We conclude by reflecting on what researchers might learn from a cultural turn, and what it means substantively, theoretically, and methodologically.
12.00-14.00Cambridge, online
25
February2022
Higher education, conflict and crisis: The ‘publicness’ of the national university in LebanonHelen Murray, University of Sussex
For a long time, higher education has been absent from research and policy priorities in the field of education, conflict and peacebuilding. This is now changing but it remains within an economic paradigm that focuses almost exclusively on questions of access and human capital, marginalising the political significance of universities in contexts of conflict and post-conflict recovery. At the same time, there is an under-theorisation of the political dimensions of universities, including the question of what makes a university ‘public’ in a political democratic sense. Overlooked in theory, disregarded in policymaking, and largely ignored in research and practice, this paper makes the case for re-centring the ‘publicness’ of universities in societies affected by conflict. Following the history of the national university in Lebanon over a period of 60 years, through periods of social and political transformation, protracted civil war and post-war neoliberal reconstruction, it sheds light on the evolving ‘publicness’ of Lebanon’s only public university. This longue durée perspective points to both the democratic significance and precarity of the Lebanese University in a society divided by war, highlighting the ways in which its publicness has been continually constructed and contested in the face of relentless political and economic neglect by the state.
Drawing on narrative research interviews with current and former university students, faculty and administrators, conducted between 2017 and 2019, along with extracts from newspaper archives stretching back over 50 years, the evolving publicness of the Lebanese University is discussed in a dialogue with political theory. From Mahdi Amel’s (1968) observation that the Lebanese University was an arena for clashing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests to Bonnie Honig’s (2017) argument that ‘Public Things’ are vital objects for societal conflict, this paper goes beyond economistic and instrumentalist understandings of what makes a university ‘public’ to consider the publicness of universities. The suffix ‘ness’ denotes a spectrum – that universities can be more or less public, their publicness is not fixed but fragile, closely relating to wider conditions and struggles for democracy.
Helen Murray is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. She works with the Political Economy of Education Research Network (PEER), a 3-year collaboration between the Universities of Cape Town, Nazarbayev, Sussex and Ulster, aiming to strengthen critical political economy analyses of education systems in societies affected by conflict. In 2021 she completed her ESRC-funded PhD on the topic of ‘Universities, Conflict and the Public Sphere: Trajectories of the Public University in Lebanon’. Prior to this, Helen worked for 15 years on issues of education justice, conflict and development. Her particular interest in higher education was ignited by experiences of studying and later working at Birzeit University in Palestine, where she coordinated the Right to Education Campaign between 2004-2006. She has subsequently worked for a range of local and international organisations in policy, programming and research roles, most recently the Open Society Foundations, where she was engaged with OSF’s education and higher education work.
For a long time, higher education has been absent from research and policy priorities in the field of education, conflict and peacebuilding. This is now changing but it remains within an economic paradigm that focuses almost exclusively on questions of access and human capital, marginalising the political significance of universities in contexts of conflict and post-conflict recovery. At the same time, there is an under-theorisation of the political dimensions of universities, including the question of what makes a university ‘public’ in a political democratic sense. Overlooked in theory, disregarded in policymaking, and largely ignored in research and practice, this paper makes the case for re-centring the ‘publicness’ of universities in societies affected by conflict. Following the history of the national university in Lebanon over a period of 60 years, through periods of social and political transformation, protracted civil war and post-war neoliberal reconstruction, it sheds light on the evolving ‘publicness’ of Lebanon’s only public university. This longue durée perspective points to both the democratic significance and precarity of the Lebanese University in a society divided by war, highlighting the ways in which its publicness has been continually constructed and contested in the face of relentless political and economic neglect by the state.
Drawing on narrative research interviews with current and former university students, faculty and administrators, conducted between 2017 and 2019, along with extracts from newspaper archives stretching back over 50 years, the evolving publicness of the Lebanese University is discussed in a dialogue with political theory. From Mahdi Amel’s (1968) observation that the Lebanese University was an arena for clashing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests to Bonnie Honig’s (2017) argument that ‘Public Things’ are vital objects for societal conflict, this paper goes beyond economistic and instrumentalist understandings of what makes a university ‘public’ to consider the publicness of universities. The suffix ‘ness’ denotes a spectrum – that universities can be more or less public, their publicness is not fixed but fragile, closely relating to wider conditions and struggles for democracy.
Helen Murray is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. She works with the Political Economy of Education Research Network (PEER), a 3-year collaboration between the Universities of Cape Town, Nazarbayev, Sussex and Ulster, aiming to strengthen critical political economy analyses of education systems in societies affected by conflict. In 2021 she completed her ESRC-funded PhD on the topic of ‘Universities, Conflict and the Public Sphere: Trajectories of the Public University in Lebanon’. Prior to this, Helen worked for 15 years on issues of education justice, conflict and development. Her particular interest in higher education was ignited by experiences of studying and later working at Birzeit University in Palestine, where she coordinated the Right to Education Campaign between 2004-2006. She has subsequently worked for a range of local and international organisations in policy, programming and research roles, most recently the Open Society Foundations, where she was engaged with OSF’s education and higher education work.
13.00-15.00Cambridge, online
26
November2021
Higher education, violentmodernities and the ‘global present’: the paradox of politics and new populist imaginaries in HEJo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge
Higher Education constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In this task, Dillabough argues that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature (e.g., Rousseau, Cavarero, 2008; 2021; Honig, 2007; Laclau, 2005; Mbembe, 2019; Mouffe, 2000a, Mouffe, 2000b), an idea which she utilize to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. Whilst Rousseau’s paradox of politics, as outlined in The Social Contract, is not of particular concern in this reflection, it provides a valuable medium for conceptualising HE as a ‘problem space’ for exploring its role in the emergence of populism in HE (Scott, 1997; 2004; Carr, 2019).
This discussion engages the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the role of modern nation building, the changing features of modern power, violence and authority, and the rise of bureaucracy and technocratic rationalities as they impact upon political institutions – in this case, how they impact particularly upon HE. It draws chiefly from Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Adriana Cavarero, Chantelle Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Frederiche Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gurminder Bhambra, de Souza Santos and Achilles Mbembe, amongst others, to articulate the paradox that concerns us – to consider how and why populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE as a consequence of unresolved and contradictory political dilemmas and conflicts. Importantly, in this context, the paradox of politics in HE is not necessarily the naming of a discrete conflict between two political logics or the process of a mass movement seeking to overtake HE in the name of a popular constituency. Rather, it involves a highly complex set of forces – emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradox of liberalism itself – that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance, particularly in relation to state crises, crises in knowledge making and in critique (see Kosselack, 1979) and geo-political conflicts and most importantly in forms of ‘horrorism’ that shape our modern landscape.
Higher Education constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In this task, Dillabough argues that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature (e.g., Rousseau, Cavarero, 2008; 2021; Honig, 2007; Laclau, 2005; Mbembe, 2019; Mouffe, 2000a, Mouffe, 2000b), an idea which she utilize to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. Whilst Rousseau’s paradox of politics, as outlined in The Social Contract, is not of particular concern in this reflection, it provides a valuable medium for conceptualising HE as a ‘problem space’ for exploring its role in the emergence of populism in HE (Scott, 1997; 2004; Carr, 2019).
This discussion engages the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the role of modern nation building, the changing features of modern power, violence and authority, and the rise of bureaucracy and technocratic rationalities as they impact upon political institutions – in this case, how they impact particularly upon HE. It draws chiefly from Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Adriana Cavarero, Chantelle Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Frederiche Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gurminder Bhambra, de Souza Santos and Achilles Mbembe, amongst others, to articulate the paradox that concerns us – to consider how and why populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE as a consequence of unresolved and contradictory political dilemmas and conflicts. Importantly, in this context, the paradox of politics in HE is not necessarily the naming of a discrete conflict between two political logics or the process of a mass movement seeking to overtake HE in the name of a popular constituency. Rather, it involves a highly complex set of forces – emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradox of liberalism itself – that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance, particularly in relation to state crises, crises in knowledge making and in critique (see Kosselack, 1979) and geo-political conflicts and most importantly in forms of ‘horrorism’ that shape our modern landscape.
12.00-14.00Cambridge, online
22
October2021
Education, Conflict & Crisis: From Critique to TransformationMario Novelli, University of Sussex
Whilst the current COVID19 pandemic has brought home to many citizens in the Global North the fragility of their existence, including a lack of resilience in education systems and exacerbation of widespread learning inequalities, in the Global South this is but one more crisis in a long list that has punctuated daily lives and educational journeys. This seminar seeks to go beyond narrow understandings of education and its relationship to economy and society by critically exploring the complex ways that education systems and state education policies and practices are linked to war, peace and crises, not merely as victims but also as drivers and catalysts. In doing so I will seek to highlight that education systems and actors have agency – they are capable of producing conflict-ridden and crisis-prone systems as well as radically transforming them – and that policy and practice matters in the pursuit of more socially just and equitable educational systems and a fairer and better world. Drawing on evidence from a series of research projects, the session will critically reflect on the ways in which the relationship between education, conflict and crisis has been constructed, nationally and transnationally, as a field of research and practice. It will also highlight the ongoing need for critically informed research on the education/conflict /crisis relationship that can decouple itself from the hegemony of Global North funders, agencies and actors and the inherent biases and injustices within dominant lenses, priorities and perspectives.
Professor Mario Novelli is a Professor in the Political Economy of Education at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex and Deans Distinguished Research Fellow (2021-2024) at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.
Whilst the current COVID19 pandemic has brought home to many citizens in the Global North the fragility of their existence, including a lack of resilience in education systems and exacerbation of widespread learning inequalities, in the Global South this is but one more crisis in a long list that has punctuated daily lives and educational journeys. This seminar seeks to go beyond narrow understandings of education and its relationship to economy and society by critically exploring the complex ways that education systems and state education policies and practices are linked to war, peace and crises, not merely as victims but also as drivers and catalysts. In doing so I will seek to highlight that education systems and actors have agency – they are capable of producing conflict-ridden and crisis-prone systems as well as radically transforming them – and that policy and practice matters in the pursuit of more socially just and equitable educational systems and a fairer and better world. Drawing on evidence from a series of research projects, the session will critically reflect on the ways in which the relationship between education, conflict and crisis has been constructed, nationally and transnationally, as a field of research and practice. It will also highlight the ongoing need for critically informed research on the education/conflict /crisis relationship that can decouple itself from the hegemony of Global North funders, agencies and actors and the inherent biases and injustices within dominant lenses, priorities and perspectives.
Professor Mario Novelli is a Professor in the Political Economy of Education at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex and Deans Distinguished Research Fellow (2021-2024) at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.
12.00 – 14.00Cambridge, online
10
September2021
Higher Education, Violent Modernities and the ‘Global Present’: The Paradox of Politics and New Populist Imaginaries in HEJo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge
Project PI Jo-Anne Dillabough will be on the Keynote panel at ECER 2021. The conference theme is ‘Education and Society: expectations, prescriptions, reconciliations’. At the EERA Panel, the ECER 2021 Keynote Speakers – Jo-Anne Dillabough (University of Cambridge), Phillipp Gonon (University of Zurich), and Lorenzo Bonoli (Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training), Kirsti Klette (University of Oslo), Laura Lundy (Queen’s University Belfast), Anne Rohstock (University of Tübingen), and Ninni Wahlström (Linnaeus University) – will discuss with each other and also enter into dialogue with the audience.
Watch Video
Project PI Jo-Anne Dillabough will be on the Keynote panel at ECER 2021. The conference theme is ‘Education and Society: expectations, prescriptions, reconciliations’. At the EERA Panel, the ECER 2021 Keynote Speakers – Jo-Anne Dillabough (University of Cambridge), Phillipp Gonon (University of Zurich), and Lorenzo Bonoli (Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training), Kirsti Klette (University of Oslo), Laura Lundy (Queen’s University Belfast), Anne Rohstock (University of Tübingen), and Ninni Wahlström (Linnaeus University) – will discuss with each other and also enter into dialogue with the audience.
Watch Video
11.00-12.30Geneva, online