Freire Forty Years Later Symposium
Saturday 10 April 2010
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL USA
Annie May Swift Hall
Speakers:
Wahneema Lubiano (Duke U.)
Della Pollock (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Donaldo Macedo (UMass-Boston)
Dana Cloud (UT-Austin)
Melissa Wade (Emory U.)
2010 marks the fortieth anniversary of the English translation of Paulo
Freire's vastly influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and this year
provides an opportunity to highlight its continued relevance and importance.
The book was published in Portuguese in 1968 and translated into English two
years later, coinciding with Freire's visiting professorship at Harvard
University. Pedagogy of the Oppressed has remained in print across the world
and in many languages since, and has had significant impact on university
and community pedagogy, theory, theatre, and activism. The Freire Forty
Years Later Symposium honors this significant contribution to pedagogy, but
also recognizes and hopes to explore the work within the changing social,
cultural, economic, and political environments of the past forty tumultuous
years.
In light of the last forty years, however, we must update Paulo Freire's
work. How do we read Pedagogy of the Oppressed after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the disillusionment with communism? How can we think
theoretically about the concepts of "oppression" and "freedom"? How can we
engage Freire within the current global economic, political, and cultural
flows of transnationalism, neoliberalism, privatization? How do we read
Pedagogy of the Oppressed alongside current critical thought on cultural
studies, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and ethics?
For more information, visit www.humanities.northwestern.edu or write Daniel
Elam at (jdelam /at/ u.northwestern.edu)
Freire Forty Years Later is an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
Research Workshop with additional funding from Rhetoric and Public Culture
program, Performance Studies department, Center for Global Culture and
Communication, The Graduate School, Center for Civic Engagement, Program in
African Studies, and Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, Northwestern
University.
