[ecrea] cfp: avant-garde pedagogies

*CALL FOR PAPERS: AVANT-GARDE PEDAGOGIES*
Friday 8th and Saturday 9th July 2016 University of Westminster, London

Hosted by the Higher Education and Theory (HEAT) network, the Institute
for Modern and Contemporary Culture (University of Westminster) and the
Philosophy of Education Research Centre (University of Winchester)

The conference is intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum for
addressing how we might respond to the contemporary crisis or
transformation of education without succumbing to conservative nostalgia
for the past or an uncritical acquiescence to present forces in an
increasingly corporately-driven agenda. The concept of the avant-garde
will be used as a lens to focus these discussions.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a series of
social, political, economic and technological upheavals that transformed
aesthetics and contributed to a sense of the crisis of the arts and
culture. While the technical developments of photography, radio and
film, increasing commodification, the emergence of the culture industry
and the rise of kitsch, mass and popular culture produced tensions
within art that lead to a reactionary nostalgia for the culture of the
past they also gave rise to a period of intense artistic innovation and
experimentation that has come to be associated with modernism and the
avant-garde. As Poggioli Renato puts it, avant-garde literature sought
to be not a ‘display case or a salesroom but a free, or least an open,
laboratory’.

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger claimed the avant-garde
turns against both ‘the distribution apparatus on which the work of art
depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the
concept of the autonomy’. If the publication of Bürger’s book in 1974
perhaps marks the point of avant-garde art’s exhausted collapse into
postmodernism, Hannah Arendt was already in the 1950s anticipating an
attendant ‘crisis of education’. At the turn of the twenty-first
century, a comparable series of transformations – the rise of the
internet and new media, the dominance of the education industry,
commodification and indebtedness, globalisation and the growth of mass
and popular education – have lead teachers, scholars and activists to
talk increasingly of a contemporary assault on education.

In response to these claims, this conference seeks to address these
issues through the lens of the avant-garde. It seeks to recover an
alternative perspective for theoretical approaches beyond the impasses
designated by classical philosophies and postmodern theories of
education. For the avant-garde is ‘not that which is most historically
advanced in the sense that it has most history behind it’ but, as Peter
Osborne suggests, that which ‘disrupts the linear time- consciousness of
progress in such a way as to enable us, like the child, to “discover the
new anew” and, along with it, the possibility of a better future’. Or,
as Jacques Rancière more succinctly claims, the avant-garde is ‘the
aesthetic anticipation of the future’.

A hundred years on from the frenetic flurry of movements and manifestoes
that characterized the high point of modernism and the avant-garde in
art, this conference asks where can we find the comparable
experimentation in pedagogical theory and practice or the open
laboratory of learning? How might such modernist or avant-garde impulses
in the arts provide a framework for calling into question not merely
traditional or bourgeois pedagogical ideas, techniques and the
distribution apparatus upon which education depends, but perhaps also
the dominance and assumed value of higher education itself within
contemporary society?

‘The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider
only facts relating directly to our experience ...Under the pretence of
civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind
everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy;
forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance
with accepted practices... we do not "learn," ...all we ever do is
"relearn”’ - (Manifesto of Surrealism)

Currently Confirmed Speakers:
Alan Golding (English, Louisville, KY.), author of ‘Isn’t the
avant-garde always pedagogical: Experimental Poetics and/as Pedagogy’
(2006) and From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (1995).

Aislinn O’Donnell (Learning, Society and Religious Education, Mary
Immaculate College, University of Limerick), author of ‘Experimental
Philosophy and Pedagogy’ (2015) and ‘Another Relationship to Failure:
Reflections on Beckett, Failure and Education’ (2014).

Gary Peters (Faculty of Arts, York St John University), author of
‘Ignorant Students/Ignorant Teachers’ (2010) and Irony and Singularity:
Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas (2005).

Hannah Proctor (English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London),
author of ‘Synthetic Dreams: Gender, Modernity and Art Silk Stockings’
(2015) and ‘Neuronal Ideologies: Catherine Malabou’s Explosive
Plasticity in Light of the Marxist Psychology of A. R. Luria’ (2011).

Stevphen Shukaitis (Centre for Work, Organization and Society,
University of Essex), author of “Pedagogical Labor in an Age of Devalued
Reproduction” (2016) and The Composition of Movements to Come:
Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016).

Peter Roberts (School of Educational Studies and Leadership, University
of Canterbury, NZ), author of Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking
the Role of Education (2016) and Better Worlds: Education, Art, and
Utopia (2013).


Titles & abstracts to be sent to Matthew Charles by Tuesday 1st March
2016: (M.Charles1 /at/ westminster.ac.uk) Possible Areas of Interest:
- Aesthetic education: Dada, Fluxist, Futurist, Surrealist or Vorticist
perspectives
- Avant-garde architecture and spaces of learning
- Avant-garde pedagogies and institutional critique: unschooling, unlearning
- Chance, spontaneity, the irrational and the unconscious: towards
anti-constructivist theories of learning
- Cognitive capitalism and teaching in the creative industries
- Contradictions of contemporary pedagogy: education and anti-education
-  “Dada means nothing”: pedagogical pessimism, educational nihilism
-  Ezra Pound as educator: teaching literature
- Feminism, modernism and education: Amy Lowell, H. D., May Sinclair and
Virginia Woolf
- “Grand Pedagogy”: Brecht’s Didacticism
- Historic, Neo- and Post-Avant-gardes and education
- Kitsch, education and public policy
- Pedagogical experimentations and innovations: flipped, blended, hybrid
learning and the avant-garde
- Queer Pedagogies/Queering Education
- The Academy and the avant-garde: dependence and resistance
- The poets, artists and pedagogues of the Black Mountain College
- The Russian avant-garde, biomechanics, Soviet psychology: historical,
dialectical and anthropological materialist theories of education
-  Torn-halves: elite education, the Educational Industry and Adorno
- Walter Benjamin on teaching in the age of digital reproducibility

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